The Justice Department is choosing not to fight back against frivolous cases against the ACA.

This is the stuff that needs to be covered on CNN for hours. Not Roseanne and Stormy Daniels.

https://www.politico.com/story/2018/06/07/obamacare-trump-administration-court-case-texas-606930


Trump administration backs court case to overturn key Obamacare provisions
Trump’s Justice Department is calling on the courts to throw out protections for people with pre-existing conditions.

The Trump administration is urging a federal court to dismantle two of the most popular provisions of Obamacare, but to delay taking such drastic action until after the midterm elections this fall.

Responding to a lawsuit from conservative states seeking to invalidate the Affordable Care Act, the Justice Department told a judge in Texas on Thursday that Congress’ decision to repeal the penalty for failing to buy health insurance renders unconstitutional other Obamacare language banning insurers from charging people more or denying them coverage based on a pre-existing condition.


The Texas-led lawsuit filed in February claims that the recent elimination of Obamacare’s individual mandate penalty means that the whole health care law should now be ruled invalid. The mandate penalty was wiped out effective in 2019 as part of the GOP tax law passed late last year, H.R. 1 (115).

The administration's evening filing says it agrees with states bringing the suit that the individual mandate is unconstitutional, as are two of the law’s major insurance provisions meant to protect people with expensive medical conditions. With the filing, the Trump administration is asking the courts to wipe out protections that many congressional Republicans were wary of eliminating in their failed efforts to repeal Obamacare.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions, in a letter to House Speaker Paul Ryan, acknowledged that the executive branch typically defends existing federal law, but he said this was a “rare care where the proper course” is to forgo defense of the individual mandate. He said the two insurance provisions, known as guaranteed issue and community rating, should be struck because they are too closely tied to the individual mandate. Without the mandate, Sessions wrote, “individuals could wait until they become sick to purchase insurance, thus driving up premiums for everyone else.”

The administration's decision means that a group of 15 Democratic states led by California will be largely responsible for defending the Obamacare against its latest legal threat.

California Attorney General Xavier Becerra called the lawsuit “dangerous and reckless” and argued that the Supreme Court already upheld the legality of the individual mandate in earlier decisions. He estimated that the states that are defending the health law could lose half a trillion dollars in health care funding if the lawsuit is successful.

"I am at a loss for words to explain how big of a deal this is," University of Michigan health law professor Nicholas Bagley, an authority on Obamacare, wrote on Twitter. "The Justice Department has a durable, longstanding, bipartisan commitment to defending the law when non-frivolous arguments can be made in its defense. This brief torches that commitment."

Still, the Justice Department said that other provisions of the law, such as the health insurance marketplaces and Medicaid expansion, should not be struck down with the mandate. The administration also said the court shouldn’t grant the states’ request to immediately halt the law while the court challenge is pending because the individual mandate penalty will remain in effect until January.

The Trump administration has taken numerous steps to dismantle the law — eliminating a key subsidy, paring back outreach and marketing funds, and promoting health plans that don’t meet the law’s robust requirements.

Repeal efforts have largely stalled on the Hill, and the health law remains on the books. Insurers have begun to file 2019 rate proposals, and Virginia‘s governor signed Medicaid expansion into law Thursday. Still, the Trump administration has been using executive power and regulations to further undermine the health law.

By adopting this legal position — refusing to defend key parts of the law — the administration is taking its fight against Obamacare even further, said Tom Miller, a resident health policy fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

The federal government would usually defend a lawsuit brought against it by states. This filing reveals the Trump administration’s attempt to appease its base while defending other popular parts of the law. With this filing, Trump “can have his cake and eat it too by saying we got rid of individual mandate,” said Miller.

Conservative states hope the legal challenge will be the fifth involving Obamacare to reach the Supreme Court — although this lawsuit has been seen as a long shot.

Ironically, the states based their case in part on Chief Justice John Roberts’ 2012 decision that upheld the legality of the individual mandate as a tax and recognized the penalty as crucial to making Obamacare function. The states say that means the entire law should no longer stand without the tax penalty.

Conservative states hope they have improved their case’s prospects by finding individual plaintiffs who say they are still hurt by the mandate even though the penalty is gone and by filing the suit in a favorable venue.

The first arguments will be aired in Fort Worth later this year before District Judge Reed O’Connor, a George W. Bush appointee who in 2016 ruled against Obamacare regulations barring health care providers from discriminating against transgender patients and those seeking abortion-related care.

The Trump administration’s decision not to defend a law it administers has recent precedent. In 2011, the Obama administration said it wouldn’t the defend the Defense of Marriage Act, which banned federal recognition of same-sex marriage. Two years later, the Supreme Court struck down a key part of DOMA, and it recognized the right to same-sex marriage nationwide in 2015.

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That is all.

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Gone: My Discogs collection for The Roots:
http://www.discogs.com/user/tomhayes-roots/collection

Everything else is a distraction

IDGAF who gets invited to the WH, decides to go or not, etc...

They're trying to kill us.

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If you can't understand it without an explanation

you can't understand it with an explanation

polling has consistently shown healthcare to be the most important issue to voters right now and democrats have a huge margin of favorability on that issue. its responsible for almost singlehandedly winning some key elections the past year and change. why would they wanna fire up activists/moms/med unions/etc over this issue again?

https://www.vox.com/2018/12/14/18065838/obamacare-unconstitutional-texas-ruling

Federal court rules Obamacare unconstitutional — but the law stands for now
The lawsuit — backed by the Trump administration — threatens to overturn Obamacare’s ban on pre-existing conditions.
By Sarah Kliff
Dec 14, 2018, 8:39pm EST

A federal judge in Texas has ruled the Affordable Care Act unconstitutional, finding that the law cannot stand now that Congress has rolled back the mandate that everyone carry health insurance or pay a fine.

The new ruling poses a significant threat to the Affordable Care Act’s most popular and most sweeping health insurance reforms. If affirmed at higher courts, it could roll back Obamacare’s ban on pre-existing conditions. Insurers would once again be able to charge sick patients higher premiums.

The Trump administration had partially supported this lawsuit, filing a brief asking the court to overturn Obamacare’s ban on pre-existing conditions.

“The Court finds the Individual Mandate ‘is essential to’ and inserverable from ‘the other provisions’ of the ACA,” judge Reed O’Connor wrote in a late Friday ruling.

O’Connor’s decision will near certainly be appealed up to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which could ultimately send the case to the Supreme Court. It is not entirely clear yet what the ruling will mean for current Obamacare enrollees — or those currently signing up, as the program’s open enrollment period ends at midnight on Friday.

Legal experts on the left and the right believe the arguments being made by Republican-led states are, on their face, uncompelling and unlikely to succeed in overturning the Affordable Care Act.

At the same time, there is a history of lawsuits that most legal experts thought were unpersuasive nonetheless putting ACA in mortal danger — first the lawsuit against the individual mandate and then the challenge to insurance subsidies.

With this first victory, it becomes a more real possibility that this lawsuit could end up in that category.

Texas v. United States, the lawsuit that threatens to take down Obamacare, explained

Twenty state attorneys general filed this lawsuit against Obamacare in early 2018. They essentially make a two-part argument for why Obamacare is unconstitutional in the wake of Congress’ decision to end the law’s mandate to carry health insurance.

The first part of their argument is over the individual mandate itself. Remember, the 2017 tax bill got rid of the financial penalties for remaining uninsured. But it didn’t totally kill off this part of Obamacare. The mandate to carry health insurance actually still stands as federal law — there just isn’t any fine for those who decide not to comply.

The Supreme Court specifically upheld the individual mandate as a tax. If there the mandate doesn’t have a penalty, the attorneys general argue, then its no longer a tax — and thus unconstitutional.

On its own, a court decision that declares the individual mandate unconstitutional wouldn’t be a big deal for Obamacare. The financial penalty is, after all, already gone.

But the state attorneys general take their case a step further. They argue that, if the individual mandate is declared unconstitutional, than the rest of the law needs to fall along with it. Or, as the lawsuit itself puts it: “Once the heart of the ACA—the individual mandate—is declared unconstitutional, the remainder of the ACA must also fall.”

Essentially, the state attorneys general are arguing that the individual mandate isn’t severable from the rest of the law. If the court finds the mandate unconstitutional, then the rest of the law — everything from protections for pre-existing conditions to the Medicaid expansion required calorie labeling on menus — has to go down with it.

Usually, a presidential administration defends current law, but the Trump administration took a different approach in this case. It agreed with the conservative states that the mandate and, with it, the law’s rules that prohibits insurers from denying people health insurance or charging them higher rates, should be found unconstitutional.

However, the Justice Department lawyers didn’t go quite as far as the state attorneys general. They told the court that the rest of the law could stand, including the law’s massive expansion of Medicaid to millions of the nation’s poorest citizens.

If the Trump administration’s argument were to prevail, insurers could once again be able to flat-out deny Americans insurance based on their health status. No amount of federal subsidies would protect them. Medicaid expansion would remain, but the private insurance market would no longer guarantee coverage to every American.

Because the Trump administration is not defending the Affordable Care Act in this case, a group of pro-Obamacare attorneys general from 16 states and the District of Columbia swooped in to take over the case.

They argue that Congress clearly understood what it was doing when it reduced the individual mandate penalty to zero dollars. Their intent was to get rid of the penalty but leave the rest of the law standing, and that the Courts ought to respect that.

Most legal experts, it’s worth noting, are skeptical of the arguments made in this case — even those that have worked on other legal challenges to the Affordable Care Act. They say that it willfully ignores the intent of the 2017 Congress, which zeroed out the individual mandate penalty without touching the rest of the Affordable Care Act.

”They are asking the court to evaluate the current law on the basis of what the law used to be,” Jonathan Adler, a law professor at Case Western University who supported previous Obamacare challenges, has told Vox. “That whole analysis just doesn’t apply or work anymore.”