The U.S. Supreme avoided a shameful and disastrous self-inflicted wound on its credibility by turning aside yet another effort to strike down the Affordable Care Act today. Justice Stephen Breyer presented the majority decision, summarily dismissing the plaintiffs’ arguments that they are “harmed” by the law as specious.
In 2018, U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor made the absurd ruling in the case brought by Texas and other states supported by the Trump administration that the individual mandate was “inseverable” from the rest of the law, and thus the entire law must be struck down. O’Connor claimed that since no one is now “forced” to buy insurance because of the lack of a penalty, that automatically reduced the “pool” of persons seeking insurance through the law, thus it no longer had reason for being—even the minimum level of coverage requirement was not a “sufficient” reason for keeping the law.
This rationalization made no sense whatever, and didn’t even address the plaintiffs’ plainly fraudulent claim of “harm.” The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals partially upheld the district court ruling, but also upheld the plaintiffs’ claim of “standing,” which the Supreme Court rejected out-of-hand in remanding its decision to the Fifth, instructing it to dismiss its own plainly faulty ruling. Justice Breyer observed that
Unsurprisingly, the States have not demonstrated that an unenforceable mandate will cause their residents to enroll in valuable benefits programs that they would otherwise forgo. It would require far stronger evidence than the States have offered here to support their counterintuitive theory of standing, which rests on a “highly attenuated chain of possibilities"…No one claims these other provisions violate the Constitution. Rather, the state plaintiffs attack the constitutionality of only the minimum essential coverage provision. They have not alleged that they have suffered an “injury fairly traceable to the defendant’s allegedly unlawful conduct.”
Even though this was the weakest challenge yet to the law, it was perhaps surprising that Clarence Thomas concurred in the majority 7-2 decision, this time not following the petty, childish dissent of Samuel Alito, who made the absurd claim that “Today’s decision is the third installment in our epic Affordable Care Act trilogy, and it follows the same pattern as installments one and two. In all three episodes, with the Affordable Care Act facing a serious threat, the court has pulled off an improbable rescue.” But Thomas surprisingly felt the need to explain his break from Alito, writing “The plaintiffs failed to demonstrate that the harm they suffered is traceable to unlawful conduct. Although this Court has erred twice before in two cases involving the Affordable Care Act, it does not err today.”
There was nothing “serious” or “improbable” about the majority decision, especially when the dissenters relied on false arguments and acted like sore losers. Alito claimed that he was “impressed” by the “lengths to which this court has been willing to defend the ACA against all threats,” including the claim that states bore a “costly burden” of taxes—meaning the taxing authority of Congress that Chief Justice John Roberts had upheld in the 2012 decision.
But Alito’s argument that that individual mandate was a “tax”—after having argued that it was not in 2012—that harmed individuals was simply throwing a rubber ball at a wall hoping it would “stick.” The Republican 2017 tax “reform” law had already rendered the point moot by reducing the penalty for being uninsured to “zero,” and thus the plaintiffs had no “standing” because they could not prove they had been harmed; one suspects that the reason the individual mandate was allowed to remain on the books by the 2017 law was to serve as a “rationalization” to bring this absurd challenge to the law.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who represents a low-wage, low-benefit state that apparently hates half its citizens so much that he thinks they should just go away the “natural way” without affordable health care, made the pitiful argument after the decision that the ACA represented a “massive government takeover of health care,” despite the fact that only 10 percent of the total population is insured by the law. Paxton, like most extremist Republicans, is really bemoaning the ACA’s requirement of minimum standards of coverage, which has hurt Texas-based insurance scams. His argument is that states don’t have to care one wit about whether their citizens live or die because they don’t have access to adequate medical care. The anti-ACA crowd wants to play “God,” and it is an evil “god” they want to be.
The majority of the Supreme Court clearly did not want to be seen as the villain in throwing 31 million people off affordable care, and returning to a time when health insurers either stopped providing individual coverage for those whose employers did not provide insurance, or charged impossible premiums. Before the ACA, the only “options” were “mini-medical” plans whose premiums often cost more than the actual “benefits,” or be refused care for lack of insurance, or end-up in the emergency room and find themselves impossibly in debt for the rest of the “lives.” The only people who want to go back to that are people who lack any gram of empathy for their fellow humans.
For now, insurers still may not refuse coverage to people with pre-existing conditions or charge them unaffordable rates. Nor can they put a “cap” on the amount of benefits, and the law reduces annual out-of-pocket liability. Of the 31 million people who are currently covered by the ACA, almost half are covered through expanded Medicaid. And yet the large majority of Republicans oppose the law, which shows us the divide between people who think that affordable health care is a “right,” and those who think it is a “privilege”; what makes it more “ironic” is that white voters (mainly Republicans) think that it is both their “right” and their “privilege” to have affordable care—and to deny it to the mainly minority “undeserving.”
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