�Թϲ�����

KHN: Supreme Court Declines To Overturn ACA — Again 

The Supreme Court on Thursday turned back its third chance to upend the Affordable Care Act, rejecting a lawsuit filed by a group of Republican state attorneys general claiming that a change made by Congress in 2017 had rendered the entire law unconstitutional. By a vote of 7-2, however, the justices did not even reach the merits of the case, ruling instead that the suing states and the individual plaintiffs, two self-employed Texans, lacked “standing” to bring the case to court. (Rovner, 6/17)

The 7-2 decision, written by Justice Stephen G. Breyer, means the court did not address legal questions about whether the law, known as the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, is invalid because it no longer has a penalty for most Americans who don’t get health coverage. “We proceed no further than standing,” Breyer wrote, because the challengers did not demonstrate that additional costs they would incur are “fairly traceable” to the “allegedly unlawful conduct” of which they complain. “They have failed to show that they have standing to attack as unconstitutional the Act’s minimum essential coverage provision,” Breyer wrote. (Ruger, 6/17)

The margin of victory was wider than in the earlier cases, with six members of the court joining Justice Stephen G. Breyer’s modest and technical majority opinion, one that said only that the 18 Republican-led states and two individuals who brought the case had not suffered the sort of direct injury that gave them standing to sue. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who had cast the decisive vote to save the law in 2012, was in the majority. So was Justice Clarence Thomas, who had dissented in the earlier decisions. ... Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Brett M. Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett also joined Justice Breyer’s majority opinion. At Justice Barrett’s confirmation hearings last year, Democrats portrayed her as a grave threat to the health care law. (Liptak, 6/17)

Texas and other Republican-leaning states, backed by the Trump administration, had sought to strike down the law on technical arguments after Congress reduced to zero the tax penalty for failing to carry health insurance. Thursday’s decision, written by Justice Stephen Breyer, concluded that none of the plaintiffs suffered any injury from zeroing out the penalty and thus lacked legal standing to bring the lawsuit at all. It was the third time the court has preserved the 2010 healthcare law. “We do not reach these questions of the Act’s validity,” Justice Breyer wrote. “Texas and the other plaintiffs in this suit lack the standing necessary to raise them.” (Kendall, Bravin and Armour, 6/17)

President Joe Biden, who served as Obama’s vice president when the law was signed, praised Thursday’s ruling as a “major victory” for millions of Americans who were at risk of losing their health care in the midst of the Covid pandemic if the law was overturned. “After more than a decade of attacks on the Affordable Care Act through the Congress and the courts, today’s decision – the third major challenge to the law that the U.S. Supreme Court has rejected – it is time move forward and keep building on this landmark law,” Biden said in a statement. “Today’s decision affirms that the Affordable Care Act is stronger than ever, delivers for the American people, and gets us closer to fulfilling our moral obligation to ensure that, here in America, health care is a right and not a privilege,” he said. (Higgins and Breuninger, 6/17)

In what has become something of a Washington tradition, the Supreme Court again upheld the Affordable Care Act on Thursday, in the third major case from Republican challengers to reach the high court. The margin this time was larger, 7-2, as the High Court appears less and less interested in revisiting the health care law through the judiciary. Democrats hailed the ruling as a boost to their signature law, and Republicans were left to figure out a path forward on health care amid another defeat. (Sullivan, 6/17)

The key fault line in the Supreme Court that Donald Trump built is not the ideological clash between right and left — it’s the increasingly acrimonious conflict within the court’s now-dominant conservative wing. Those rifts burst wide open on Thursday with two of the highest-profile decisions of the court’s current term. In both the big cases — involving Obamacare and a Catholic group refusing to vet same-sex couples as foster parents in Philadelphia — conservative justices unleashed sharp attacks that seemed aimed at their fellow GOP appointees for failing to grapple with the core issues the cases presented. (Gerstein, 6/17)

Members of the Biden administration and Democratic lawmakers took to social media Thursday to praise the Supreme Court’s decision upholding ObamaCare against the latest Republican challenge. White House chief of staff Ron Klain tweeted, “It's still a BFD,” apparently referring to the abbreviation for “big f---ing deal,” a remark that then-Vice President Biden was recorded uttering to then-President Obama at the 2010 signing ceremony for the Affordable Care Act (ACA). (Castronuovo, 6/17)

Democratic lawmakers and much of the health care industry cheered the Supreme Court’s ruling Thursday to uphold the 2010 health care law. Democrats had campaigned against the legal challenge during the past two campaign cycles, arguing that their party would protect health insurance coverage. The decision comes as Democratic leaders are determining which health care provisions they may include in a fiscal 2022 budget resolution. (McIntire, 6/17)