A Federal Court May Soon Do What Congress Could Not: Obliterate Obamacare

[babylonsister]

Jurisprudence
A Federal Court May Soon Do What Congress Could Not: Obliterate Obamacare
Thousands organized to save the Affordable Care Act in 2017. Now the entire law may be struck down when no one’s looking.
By Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern
Oct 31, 2019
5:45 AM


The Trump administration is trying to take away health care from millions of Americans. Yet nobody is campaigning on, fundraising off, or publicizing this imminent threat. That’s astounding. But any day now, aided and abetted by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the Trump administration is poised to stick a knife in the heart of what remains of the Affordable Care Act. At minimum, this president will be throwing 20 million people who obtained insurance under the ACA off of their plans. That should be something we are reminded of daily.

The notoriously conservative appellate court will decide a challenge to a state-led effort to end the ACA once and for all, on the dubious legal theory that, when Congress chose not to kill Obamacare in 2017, it actually intended to kill the law. If the court embraces this theory, it could send the American health care system into a tailspin and affect nearly all Americans’ coverage to varying degrees. A three-judge panel of that court heard arguments in July. A decision is imminent.

Elections rise and fall on guarantees of affordable, efficient health care. But this looming catastrophe hasn’t come up at a single Democratic debate. It has been absent from the daily news cycle for months. Donald Trump’s fiercest critics on the hill rarely mention it. Yes, it’s easy to be distracted. After all, the Trump administration is simultaneously kidnapping children from migrant parents and bilking students to repay loans and facing an impeachment effort. But if the court he packed succeeds in destroying the ACA, it could be the single most consequential event of Trump’s presidency, and can sit right up there with the rescission of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, the travel ban, and the family separation policy as humanitarian catastrophes. And yet almost nobody is talking about it, because it’s happening in the courts, in the dark, and yet also right out in the open.

more...

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/10/obamacare-fifth-circuit-texas.html

[beachbumbob]

1. heading into Nov 2020 elections, this is not a winning position for trump or GOP

will be brutal results

[MarcA]

2. Unelected, Appointed for Life, Benefits paid by taxpayers.

That's a sure formula for a nation's continued existence - Not!

[AJT]

3. Guess I'll go without healthcare.

[Hortensis]

4. Yes, and MfA would be similarly attacked by professional assassins.

Too many seem to happily assume MfA would be some kind of bullet-proof alternative because of, you know, the "Medicare" in the name. It's critical to realize that a conservative court decision snuffing the ACA would be an extremely bad sign for anything we attempted to replace it with.

Also it's critically important to remember that the RW antitax plutocracy the courts are being packed to serve were implacably determined to do away with Medicare itself even before this plan to attach a giant national healthcare system to it.

Politico: ‘Death by a thousand lawsuits’: The legal battles that could dog ‘Medicare for All’

The road to health reform always ends up under a pile of lawsuits. “Medicare for All” would be no different. ... But should it ever become law, it would also invite constitutional challenges. Just like the lawsuits targeting Obamacare ... the legal battles could directly threaten or undermine the new system for many years.

In particular, the single-payer bill's ban on most private health insurance — a huge U.S. industry employing millions of people — would be an instant legal quagmire. And a host of other issues ... could easily produce another wave of lawsuits. ...

Medicare for All goes much further than the Affordable Care Act, which significantly expanded federal regulation of private insurance and has faced countless legal challenges since its enactment almost a decade ago. ...

Want national healthcare? VOTE DEMOCRAT to fix courts stacked with conservative political agents. Or expect to kiss it goodbye, perhaps sooner rather than later. With a 7-year creation and implementation period over 2 presidential terms, MfA might be destroyed, or sliced and diced into a corrupted shadow of itself, by Republicans in power and conservative courts before it ever paid for a single flu shot.

[Takket]

5. this is.............. insane.........

especially this part:

"Congress already neutralized the penalty and left the rest of the law intact. Sure, some lawmakers wanted to repeal the whole act. But that is not what they did, and it is not the judiciary’s job to do it for them, in the rearview mirror. Courts are supposed to follow the text of the law, not a conjecture as to what Congress might have done if Republicans had enough votes. "

The very idea that right wing judges can change the law based on the argument of "Rethugs would have done X but didn't have the votes so they did a small part of X, and that is as good as signaling that Congress wanted to do ALL of X, so we should have the courts declare "all of X". Voting on bills is how Congress determines what laws it wants! The minority doesn't get to repeal a law just because they put some losing votes on the board to show SOME interest to the courts.

The precedent such a ruling would make would in effect neutralize Congress and replace law making with the courts. Any shrewd lawmaker could propose a bill they know would fail but has some "attractive" part that they know will pass, then have a third part sue in the courts for a ruling that by passing PART of the bill Congress is REALLY saying <insert wordsmithing here similar to what DOJ is arguing about repealing the mandate>, so ALL the bill should be law. or vice versa for repealing laws.

[Initech]

6. Conservatives are fucking psychopaths.

They are literally going to destroy our healthcare system because they hate Obama. And no other reason. Well, it's their funeral too.

[I_UndergroundPanther]

7. I wish conservatism would die

And all the psychopaths were seen as the dangerous abusive assholes they are. And I wish there were no billionaires. The zero sum money games have to die too. I hate rich people,especially psychopath rich pigs.

[Initech]

8. Their bubble is getting so big that it is eventually going to burst.

Hell it's already starting. And it's not going to be pretty when it eventually does happen.