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 President-elect Joe Biden has criticized Republican efforts to throw
out the Affordable Care Act (ACA), as the law is formally known, in
the midst of a deadly coronavirus pandemic and hopes to buttress
Obamacare after taking office on Jan. 20.
The case represents the latest Republican legal attack on the 2010
law, which was the signature domestic policy achievement of
Democratic former President Barack Obama, under whom Biden served as
vice president.
The Supreme Court has a 6-3 conservative majority after the
Republican-led Senate last month confirmed Trump's third appointee,
Amy Coney Barrett. Most legal experts think the justices will stop
short of a seismic ruling striking down Obamacare. The Supreme Court
in 2012 and 2015 fended off previous Republican challenges to it.
Republican-governed states led by Texas, later backed by Trump's
administration, sued in 2018 in Texas to strike down the law. The
justices are due to hear 80 minutes of arguments by teleconference
in an appeal by a coalition of Democratic-led states including
California and New York and the Democratic-led House of
Representatives to preserve Obamacare.
If Obamacare were to be struck down, up to 20 million Americans
could lose medical insurance and insurers could once again refuse to
cover people with pre-existing medical conditions. Obamacare
expanded public healthcare programs and created marketplaces for
private insurance.
"We believe there are nine justices who connect the dots and see how
important this is," said California Attorney General Xavier Becerra,
a Democrat who is leading the coalition of 20 states defending
Obamacare.
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"We think there's a very strong chance that Americans will continue to have good
healthcare coverage," Becerra added.
Texas-based U.S. District Court Judge Reed O'Connor in 2018 ruled that Obamacare
was unconstitutional as currently structured in light of a Republican-backed
change made by Congress a year earlier.
The New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last year partially
upheld that ruling, saying the law's "individual mandate," which required people
to obtain insurance or pay a financial penalty, afoul of the Constitution. But
the 5th Circuit stopped short of striking down the law. The Democratic-led
states and the House then appealed to the Supreme Court.
The 2012 Supreme Court ruling upheld most Obamacare provisions including the
individual mandate. The court defined this penalty as a tax and thus found the
law permissible under the Constitution's provision empowering Congress to levy
taxes.
In 2017, Trump signed a law that eliminated the financial penalty under the
individual mandate, which gave rise to the Republican lawsuit. With that change,
the individual mandate could no longer be interpreted as a tax provision and was
therefore unlawful, the Republican challengers argued.
(Reporting by Lawrence Hurley; Editing by Will Dunham)
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