Washington – U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration has stepped up its attack on the Obamacare health care law, telling a federal appeals court it agrees with a Texas judge’s ruling that the law is unconstitutional and should be struck down.
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The Justice Department in a two-sentence letter to the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit filed on Monday said it backed the December ruling by U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor in Fort Worth that found the Affordable Care Act violated the U.S. Constitution because it required people to buy health insurance.
O’Connor ruled on a lawsuit brought by a coalition of 20 Republican-led states including Texas, Alabama and Florida, that said a Trump-backed change to the U.S. tax code made the law unconstitutional.
The 2010 law, seen as the signature domestic achievement of Trump’s Democratic predecessor, Barack Obama, has been a flash point of American politics since it passed, with Republicans including Trump repeatedly attempting to overturn it.
Democrats made defending the law a powerful messaging tool in the run-up to the November elections, when polls showed that eight in 10 Americans wanted to defend the law’s most popular benefits including protections for insurance coverage for people with preexisting conditions. The strategy paid off and Democrats won a broad 38-seat majority in the U.S. House of Representatives.
“The Department of Justice has determined that the district court’s judgment should be affirmed,” Assistant U.S. Attorney General Joseph Hunt and other federal officials wrote in the Monday letter. They said they would file a more extensive legal briefing later.
Obamacare survived a 2012 legal challenge at the Supreme Court when a majority of justices ruled the individual mandate aspect of the program was a tax that Congress had the authority to impose.
In December, O’Connor ruled that after Trump signed a $1.5 trillion tax bill passed by Congress last year that eliminated the penalties, the individual mandate could no longer be considered constitutional.
A group of 17 mostly Democratic-led states including California and New York on Monday argued that the law was constitutional.
“The individual plaintiffs do not have standing to challenge the resulting law because they suffer no legal harm from the existence of a provision that offers them a lawful choice between buying insurance or doing nothing,” they wrote in court papers.
About 11.8 million consumers nationwide enrolled in 2018 Obamacare exchange plans, according to the U.S. government’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
About 11.8 million consumers nationwide enrolled in 2018 Obamacare exchange plans, according to the U.S. government’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
The ACA is a huge tax on middle class america. There are no freebies and someone has to pay to cover the sick uninusred that companies are now required to take on under pre existing conditions.Someone also has to pay for medicad expansion. Aside for the additional costs in govt funding the insurance companies earn very low if any profits medicaid. Thus they raise premuims on us non medicad people.
Your typical non medicad recipent’s premuims went way up since the ACA and so did deductibles and copays.
And by the way why doesn’t medicad charge fat smokers a premuim for living unhealthy? Why do we the tax payers have to pay for that? My insurance charges more money for fat smokers.
Now lets discuss medicare for all. Or social mediicine.
How do you want it to work? Please spell out details.
Right now medicare does not cover long term care do you want free nursing home care for all? it cost alot of money. how do we pay for that?
What about dental, eye care etc..?
Medicare right now doesn’t cover everything and many seniors pruchase an additonal plan from the AARP. Are you OK with that?
How about copays premiums and deductibles? Can we now charge poor people some copays?? medicare does
Many dr’s don’t accept medicare. ( yes even medicare that pays out more than medicad is still not accepted by many top cancer specialists) How to you address that?
Are there any substative answers to the above questions or are we just going to yell silly populist nonsense that health care for all is a right not a privilege. (Which is a total lie.)
Only a sick ego freak like Trump would want to overturn a law that will leave millions of people uninsured so that he can score political points against his opponents and trash Obama’s legacy. Every American should shudder that this heartless man stands at the helm of this country. Let us pray that his evil plans do not bear fruition.