ACA likely to return to Supreme Court
EDITORIAL: Wayne Caswell, Founding Editor, Modern Health Talk
The fate of the Affordable Care Act seems destined to return to the US Supreme Court after toady’s hearing in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, so I’m referencing a 2018 article from the Texas Observer. It’s about Texas AG Ken Paxton as the instigator of this latest threat. My view of his likely motives and secret strategy follows.
FROM THE ARTICLE: “More than a quarter of adults in Texas have a pre-existing condition that could make them unable to get health coverage without the ACA’s requirements.
“The stories aren’t hard to find: the young uninsured woman who was hit with a $137,000 bill for brain cancer treatment. The woman whose insurance company delayed paying for surgery while her breast cancer spread. The families that sold their homes to afford medical care. The patients who moved to a different state. The ones who filed for bankruptcy. The ones who died.” [There’s also the corporate worker with good healthcare who can’t seek better opportunities elsewhere in fear that a loved one with a preexisting condition could lose access to care.]
This is the pre-ACA healthcare market that Paxton and 19 other Republican AG’s are fighting for in court.
THE LIKELY MOTIVES: The most obvious is greed and the corrupting influence of big money in politics from a medical cartel that spends far more on lobbying than the military industrial complex. This perversely profitable industry stands to lose over $1.5 trillion/year with effective healthcare reforms if they cut costs in half to match what other advanced nations spend per capita. A more subtle motive is Voter Suppression. You see, dead people don’t vote.
THE SNEAKY TACTICS: A short poison pill provision of the Trump tax cuts was quietly inserted with the objective of becoming the basis of the lawsuit known as Texas v. Azar. By reducing the tax penalty of not being insurance to zero, it could be used to render the entire ACA unconstitutional. Note that there was no congressional debate over that provision or its impact.
WHY THE COURTS? After a decade of trying to repeal & replace the ACA with no success, Republicans found another strategy that’s faster and has less risk to their careers. Unlike elected officials, judges with lifetime appointments don’t have to worry about the political impact of killing the ACA, leaving 20 million uninsured, and seeing people die as a result — tens or hundreds of thousands of them. They just move on to the next case.
RELATED ARTICLES:
Republicans ready to dive off a cliff on Obamacare (7/14/2019) — GOP senators hope the courts strike down the health law — even if they have no plan to deal with the ensuing chaos. What? There was no mention of GOP motives and the tactic of having the courts do what they themselves couldn’t, even after ten years or with control of all branches of government.
What could be next for the Affordable Care Act lawsuit (Forbes, 7/11/2019)
Republicans have no idea what they’d do if their ACA scheme succeeds (MSNBC 7/11/2019)
California v. Texas — Ending the Campaign to Undo the ACA in the Courts (New England Journal of Medicine, 7/14/21) — “On June 17, 2021, the U.S. Supreme Court, by a 7-to-2 vote, rejected what will probably be the last major case seeking to uproot the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Although skirmishes over the law and its implementation will persist, the Court’s decision most likely marks an end to Republicans’ efforts to achieve in the courts what they have been unable to achieve in Congress. The latest case — the third big ACA-related lawsuit to reach the Court — arose when Congress zeroed out the penalty for not buying health insurance as part of a tax overhaul in 2017.”