GOP lawsuit hasn’t shoved health care off a cliff — not yet. But ACA in limbo helps nobody.
Insurers feast on uncertainty the way most of us attack a holiday spread. They can relish risk because they know it can mean higher premiums and profits for their dealing with clients’ risks. This is one point to keep in mind while reading the abundant coverage of the latest step in Republicans’ decade-long assault on the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare.
A federal appeals court has struck down the zero-penalty piece of Obamacare, what many call a key part of the ACA (which, effectively, didn’t exist anyway). The judges also sent back this ACA challenge to their extremist colleague in Texas to parse which parts of Obamacare he thinks can stand up now that the sweeping health care law no longer has its “unconstitutional” individual mandate — the legal requirement that Americans must carry health insurance.
In response to a lawsuit filed against the ACA by 20 Republican attorneys general — and supported by the flip-flopping Trump Administration through the Justice Department — “U.S. Judge Reed O’Connor of the Federal District Court in Fort Worth struck down the entire law [almost a year ago], saying the individual mandate could not be severed from the rest of the Affordable Care Act because it was ‘the keystone’ of the law, essential to its regulation of the health insurance market,” the New York Times reported.