The Affordable Care Act Faces Another Supreme Court Test
WASHINGTON — Eight years ago, the Affordable Care Act barely survived its first encounter with the Supreme Court. On Tuesday, a significantly more conservative court will hear arguments in a case brought by Republican state officials, backed by the Trump administration, seeking to destroy it.
At stake are health insurance for millions of people, protections for pre-existing conditions for millions more and the fate of President Barack Obama’s signature domestic achievement, a law that has become woven into the fabric of the health care system in ways big and small.
On the surface, events since the first decision would seem to place the health care law in real peril. Not only is the federal government itself now arguing for striking it down, but President Trump, who has criticized Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.’s decisive vote to save the law and pledged that his judicial nominees would instead “do the right thing,” has named three justices to the court. The newest one, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, has written critically of the chief justice’s reasoning in the 2012 case.
But there are reasons to think the law, or at least most of it, may survive.
To win, the Republican challengers would have to run the table on three separate legal arguments. And they would have to persuade the justices that the law, which is popular and whose unraveling could cause chaos in the health care system, should be wiped out based on a highly formalistic argument. During a pandemic.
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