Just days after the upcoming presidential election, the pivotal issue of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) will once again become a key issue of the health insurance debate, only this time, with dire ramifications for millions of Americans already receiving its essential benefits.
On November 10th, the Supreme Court will hear arguments for Texas v. California – a case that once again challenges the constitutionality of the ACA. This time, the U.S. Supreme Court will decide two crucial questions: one, whether the unconstitutional individual mandate to purchase minimum essential coverage is severable from the rest of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, and second, whether the Texas Federal district court, which originally heard the case, correctly declared the entire ACA invalid and unenforceable.
What does this mean for you, the health insurance consumer worried about the future of the ACA? Well, with the current political drama of the fast-approaching presidential election, everything! Some pundits say that the attempt to rescind the ACA began with the haunting memory of now-deceased former Senator John McCain’s infamous midnight thumbs-down vote dooming the ACA’s repeal efforts early in the Trump administration. Now, surely, no one knows how the case will end!
Briefly put, in 2017, President Donald Trump signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, which eliminated the federal tax penalty for violating the individual mandate, starting from 2019. This legislation set in motion a series of events where 20 states sued in a Texas Federal district court, challenging the ACA’s constitutionality.
Many state officials supporting the lawsuit mainly argued that because the individual mandate that they stated was a critical feature of the law had been removed, the entire law was deemed invalid. A later ruling by the Federal District Judge Reed O’Connor agreed, declaring that the individual mandate requiring people to have health insurance “can no longer be sustained as an exercise of Congress’s tax power”, thus highlighting the crucial issue of “severability.” Soon after, in December 2019, a three-judge panel from the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit also ruled that the ACA’s mandate was unconstitutional, thus triggering the Supreme Court’s petition by opponents of these rulings.
Given the past efforts to unsuccessfully repeal the ACA, in June, the Trump administration agreed with the plaintiff’s claim that the ACA is unconstitutional, further fueling the health insurance debate.
However, many questioned whether it makes sense to push for the demise of the healthcare law while the COVID-19 pandemic continues to spread across the country, with dire implications for more than 20 million Americans who have gained insurance and countless others who have gained pre-existing condition protections.
Opponents, including sixteen states and the District of Columbia, together with the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives, have intervened to defend the Act. They argued essentially about how Congress wanted to keep the rest of the ACA in place even without an enforceable minimum coverage provision and that invalidating the law would create havoc about the status of the entire ACA.
Now, with the recent death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the potential ascendancy to the Supreme Court of conservative firebrand nominee, Amy Coney Barrett could tip the court to a 6-3 conservative majority. Could this be the final death knell for the ACA when the court opinion is finally released early next year?
