Conservatives giddy with a recent federal court ruling deeming the Affordable Care Act unconstitutional ought to hold their horses. Yes, the ACA needs to go. But Republican legislators aren’t getting away with the eight-year lie that they would repeal and replace the crumbling healthcare law so easily. Republicans hoping that a bit of judicial activism will save them from actually having to do their jobs and rewrite the law are in a fever dream.
The president is apparently among them.
The DEDUCTIBLE which comes with ObamaCare is so high that it is practically not even useable! Hurts families badly. We have a chance, working with the Democrats, to deliver great HealthCare! A confirming Supreme Court Decision will lead to GREAT HealthCare results for Americans!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 17, 2018
Despite optimism from White House adviser Stephen Miller, the odds of the Texas court ruling sticking are slim. For one thing, Justice John Roberts has given no indication that he’s changed his mind on Obamacare’s constitutionality. Furthermore, this new ruling specifically found the individual mandate, which has since been repealed with the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, unconstitutional.
“The court must ask whether the constitutional provisions [of Obamacare], severed from the unconstitutional one, would remain ‘fully operative as a law,'” wrote Judge Reed O’Connor. Given the lack of diligence in the mandate’s penalties in practice, this is a thin economic argument at best, and one that seems unlikely to sway Roberts. And, of course, Brett Kavanaugh’s vote would be difficult to predict.
Furthermore, repealing Obamacare is not enough, and it’s not what the Republican Party promised a generation of conservatives. The ACA certainly exacerbated the price-making power of the health insurance cartel, but the healthcare industry was far from a truly free market before the ACA, and repealing the law alone won’t fix healthcare. That’s why the better GOP talking point was always “repeal and replace Obamacare,” not just “repeal Obamacare.”
Republicans gloating about this ruling, bound to be reversed, may find their effortless glee used against them as the socialist wing of the Democratic Party begins to push single-payer healthcare in earnest as they take the House. If eight years of Republican disappointments on healthcare leaves us with slashed salaries for physicians and Soviet-style wait times for medical care, conservatives will truly be politically homeless at last.
