Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
20 States Sue Government Claiming Repeal Of Individual Mandate's Tax Penalty Renders Law Unconstitutional
A coalition of 20 U.S. states sued the federal government on Monday over Obamacare, claiming the law was no longer constitutional after the repeal last year of its requirement that people have health insurance or pay a fine. Led by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and Wisconsin Attorney General Brad Schimel, the lawsuit said that without the individual mandate, which was eliminated as part of the Republican tax law signed by President Donald Trump in December, Obamacare was unlawful. (Beech, 2/27)
"Once the heart of the ACA — the individual mandate — is declared unconstitutional, the remainder of the ACA must also fall," the states wrote in the complaint, filed in federal court in Fort Worth, Texas. (Teichert, 2/26)
The GOP tax law "eliminated the tax penalty of the ACA, without eliminating the mandate itself,” the states argue in a complaint filed today in U.S. District Court in the Northern District of Texas. “What remains, then, is the individual mandate, without any accompanying exercise of Congress’s taxing power, which the Supreme Court already held that Congress has no authority to enact." The Supreme Court in 2012 upheld Obamacare’s individual mandate in one of the highest-profile court cases in years. The justices did not agree then with the Obama administration’s main argument that the mandate penalty was valid under the Commerce Clause. But the justices did say that the mandate was a constitutional tax. (Haberkorn, 2/26)
Texas teamed up with Wisconsin on Monday to resume the fight against Obamacare by leading the charge in a 20-state lawsuit the group of largely Republican attorneys general hope will kill off the Affordable Care Act. Attorney General Ken Paxton stressed the President Trump's tax overhaul, approved in Congress late last year, renders the the health care plan's individual mandate unconstitutional because the federal government no longer imposes a tax penalty. (Zelinski, 2/26)
The case was filed by Wisconsin Attorney General Brad Schimel and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton on behalf of their states and attorneys general in 18 other states, including Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich. About 167,000 Arizonans enrolled for coverage in 2018 during last fall's enrollment period, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services website. (Coppola, 2/26)
In other health law news —
As the 2018 election season kicks into high gear across the country, lawmakers in some red states find themselves at odds over how to grapple with continually rising premiums, large swaths of low-income uninsured and overall insurance market instability. Nowhere is that more evident than in Idaho. The state nabbed headlines by asking carriers to use "creativity" in designing plans for the exchanges—including going outside the essential health benefit bounds set by the Affordable Care Act. (Luthi, 2/26)
State lawmakers in Iowa are moving to allow the Iowa Farm Bureau Federation to offer health insurance plans that don’t comply with ObamaCare protections. Two bills moving through the state legislature aim to provide Farm Bureau members with plans that cost much less than plans that are currently available on Iowa’s individual market. (Weixel, 2/26)
