Supreme Court Will Not Rule Quickly on Obamacare Appeal

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/21/us/supreme-court-obamacare.html

Supreme Court Will Not Rule Quickly on Obamacare Appeal
Democrats and the House of Representatives had urged the court to act in time to decide their appeals by the end of the court’s term in June.
By Adam Liptak
Jan. 21, 2020

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday rejected a request from Democratic state officials and the House of Representatives to quickly consider an appeal of a decision with the potential to wipe out the entire Affordable Care Act. The move means the court will almost certainly not hear the case in its current term, which ends in June.

Democrats consider health care a winning issue, and wanted the court to act quickly in order to keep the fate of the Affordable Care Act in the public eye during the presidential election. In the meantime, the law remains almost entirely intact but faces an uncertain future.

The case was originally brought by Republican state officials, who argued that changes to the Affordable Care Act made by Congress in 2017 rendered the law’s requirement that most Americans obtain health insurance unconstitutional. The Trump administration sided with the state officials, arguing that the rest of the health care law could not survive without the requirement, sometimes called the individual mandate.

A Federal District Court judge in Texas agreed, ruling that the entire law was invalid, but he postponed the effects of his ruling until the case could be appealed. In December, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, in New Orleans, agreed that the mandate was unconstitutional but declined to rule on the fate of the remainder of the health law, asking the lower court to reconsider the question in more detail.