The Department of Justice on Wednesday spelled out its arguments siding with a federal judge who ruled last year that Obamacare was unconstitutional and needed to be thrown out.
“Instead of rewriting the statute by picking and choosing which provisions to invalidate, the proper course is to strike it down in its entirety,” officials from the Department of Justice wrote in a brief filed ahead of the deadline Wednesday with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit in New Orleans. The hearing on the case, Texas v. United States, is expected in July.
The appeal comes after a federal judge in December ruled that the healthcare law, formally known as the Affordable Care Act, was unconstitutional. The judge sided with Republican state officials who filed the initial lawsuit and want the law to be thrown out as a result of the Trump-signed tax law that zeroed out Obamacare’s fine for the uninsured. They argue that without the provision requiring individuals to have insurance, the rest of the law must fall, and the federal judge, Reed O’Connor, agreed.
Democratic attorneys general appealed the case, and the ruling is being stayed in the meantime.
The Trump administration’s latest position is a shift from when the law was argued before O’Connor. The Trump administration previously argued that only the rules involving protections for people with pre-existing illnesses should fall. The protections say that insurers must cover a range of medical services and that they are not allowed to turn away sick people or charge them more than healthy people.
The administration changed its position to side with the GOP officials to have the whole law thrown out, writing in the brief filed Wednesday that “upon further consideration and review of the district court’s opinion, it is the position of the United States that the balance of the ACA also is inseverable and must be struck down” and that the fine on the uninsured “works part and parcel with the other health-insurance reforms in the ACA.”
If all of Obamacare were to be declared unconstitutional, then other provisions in the healthcare law would be undone, including the expansion of the government’s Medicaid program to the poor, cuts to drug prices in Medicaid, and a rule that allows children to remain on their parents’ health insurance plan until age 26.
