US SUPREME COURT UPHOLDS OBAMACARE IN FACE OF REPUBLICAN CHALLENGE

Thu 17 June 2021:

The US Supreme Court on Thursday ruled against Republicans seeking to challenge the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, in a decision that leaves the national health care legislation in place.
Republicans from 18 US states, backed by the former Trump administration, had filed a lawsuit challenging the penalty imposed under the legislation on people without health insurance.

“They have failed to show that they have standing to attack as unconstitutional the Act’s minimum essential coverage provision. Therefore, we reverse the Fifth Circuit’s judgment in respect to standing, vacate the judgment, and remand the case with instructions to dismiss,” Justice Stephen Breyer wrote in the court’s opinion.

The 18 states, led by Texas, had argued that the penalty imposed on those who do not have minimum essential health insurance coverage – which was reduced to $0 back in 2017 – is unconstitutional. As such, they argued that the whole piece of legislation should be thrown out, because the penalty is not severable from the rest of the act.

The opinion written by Breyer, with whom Justice Clarence Thomas concurred in his own written opinion, asserted that the plaintiffs failed to show a specific injury fairly traceable to the Obamacare penalty provision. Because the Constitution only gives the Supreme Court authority to resolve “cases” or “controversies,” the justices cannot rule in favor of the plaintiffs, they wrote.

Justices Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch, however, dissented from court’s majority opinion. “Because the mandate is unlawful and because the injury-causing provisions are inextricably linked to the mandate, the Federal defendants cannot enforce those provisions against the state plaintiffs,” Alito wrote, adding that “the state plaintiffs are entitled to a judgment providing as much.”

Thursday’s ruling marks the third time that the Supreme Court has allowed the law to stand in the face of Republican challenges to it.

FOLLOW INDEPENDENT PRESS:

TWITTER (CLICK HERE)
https://twitter.com/IpIndependent