On Dec. 18, a federal appellate court ruling has created some uncertainty around the future of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), passed in 2010. As the New York Times reported, “A federal appeals court on Wednesday struck down a central provision of the Affordable Care Act, ruling that the requirement that people have health insurance was unconstitutional. But the appeals panel did not invalidate the rest of the law, instead sending the case back to a federal district judge in Texas to “conduct a more searching inquiry” into which of the law’s many parts could survive without the mandate.”
As the Times’s Abby Goodnough wrote, “The 2-1 decision, by a panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans, left the fate of the nearly decade-old health law in limbo even as access to health care has become a central issue in the presidential race. Republicans, for whom a decision to throw out the law heading into the presidential election year could have been a political nightmare, seemed relieved, while Democrats issued a flurry of statements emphasizing that the law was still in grave danger.”
Meanwhile, the Associated Press’s Rebecca Santana, in an analysis published in the Washington Post, noted that “President Barack Obama’s signature health care law remains in legal limbo. But at least for now most of its provisions remain in effect. The decision Wednesday by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans sent the case back to a federal district court judge who had declared the entire law invalid because there was no longer a tax on people without health care. It will now be up to Judge Reed O’Connor to parse out what of the ACA should survive. But don’t expect that to be the final word on a piece of legislation that provides coverage to about 20 million people and affects coverage for millions more: WHAT’S NEXT? It’s a bit uncertain.”
Santana continued, “The appeals court told O’Connor to go over the ACA with a “finer-toothed comb” to determine which provisions of the legislation could be severed from the individual mandate, but Democratic attorneys general are weighing whether they want to appeal the case directly to the Supreme Court, which twice before has upheld the law. It’s a different court now, with a more conservative bent, but the same five justices who upheld the heart of the law in 2012 remain. California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, who is leading a coalition of states in defending the law, said Thursday that he and members of the coalition were conferring on how to proceed and would make a decision soon — meaning a Supreme Court appeal was not a certainty. But Becerra emphasized that he thought it was imperative to act quickly in order to give certainty to health care consumers and said he’d like to get the case in front of the court by this spring.” And she quoted Becerra as saying that “It’s time to stop this uncertainty and give Americans what they deserve.”
