House Republicans will be forced to vote on whether they support the Trump administration’s legal effort to eliminate the Affordable Care Act.
The House is scheduled to vote later this week on an appropriations bill amendment from Rep. Lauren Underwood, an Illinois Democrat, that would prevent the Justice Department from pursuing a lawsuit against the Affordable Care Act, according to a senior Democratic aide in the House. Underwood has pushed such legislation to protect the healthcare law in the past, but it has not succeeded.
The amendment is unlikely to become law, but the vote will allow Democrats to put Republicans on the defensive on the issue of healthcare.
The Justice Department asked the Supreme Court last month to strike down the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. It argued that the entire health law should be invalidated because it no longer has an individual mandate after Congress zeroed out the mandate’s fine as part of the 2017 GOP tax overhaul.
If the Supreme Court agrees with the Justice Department and overturns it, millions of people would lose their health insurance coverage and protections for preexisting conditions.
“President Trump and the Republicans’ campaign to rip away the protections and benefits of the Affordable Care Act in the middle of the coronavirus crisis is an act of unfathomable cruelty,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in a statement in June.
The case will likely not be decided until the spring of 2021, meaning it will hang over the elections in November.
Thus far, vulnerable Republicans in Congress who are up for reelection this year have largely avoided questions about their stance on the lawsuit, as Democrats’s support of Obamacare helped them win back the House in 2018 when the law’s popularity surged. A poll from earlier this year showed that Obamacare is more popular than ever.
Sen. Susan Collins, a Republican from Maine and a member of the Senate Health Committee, has been highly critical of the Trump administration’s attempt to strike down the healthcare law.
“The administration’s decision to submit this new brief is the wrong policy at the worst possible time as our nation is in the midst of a pandemic,” said Collins in June after the Trump administration announced the lawsuit.
Collins was one of only three Republicans to vote against the Obamacare repeal in 2017 and is facing one of the toughest reelection races of her career this fall.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the federal agency that helps implement Obamacare, said that almost 500,000 people signed up for healthcare plans after the open-enrollment period ended in December, a 46% increase from last year.
The increase in enrollment was concentrated in April and May of this year, which suggests that the burst in enrollments is tied to job losses from the coronavirus pandemic.
