Antonin Scalia is ready to rename the Affordable Care Act.
In a blistering dissent to the US supreme court’s landmark decision on Thursday to uphold key subsidies under Barack Obama’s healthcare reform legislation, the conservative justice expressed his contempt for his colleagues’ legal reasoning.
Obamacare has cleared a second major hurdle at the Supreme Court — but its troubles are far from over.
The law is still highly unpopular, and significant structural issues remain: Health insurance rates are rising, many people don’t have as much choice of doctors and hospitals as they’d like, some states continue to struggle with their exchanges, and 21 states still haven’t backed Medicaid expansion.
Yesterday, the Supreme Court sided with the Obama administration in the King v. Burwell Obamacare case. In a statement after the decision, President Obama declared that his signature health law is “here to stay.” But in his remarks, the President knowingly ignored the key concept in the case: that if the challengers had won, not one word of the law called the “Affordable Care Act” would have been changed. On the other hand, if voters elect a Republican President and a Republican Congress in 2016, quite a bit will change.
The number of doctors available in many healthcare plans is shrinking under ObamaCare, forcing some patients to pay more or switch providers, according to a new report.
Four in 10 healthcare plans sold through the government’s marketplace have so few options that their networks are described as “small” or “extra small,” according to a report by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
The U.S. Supreme Court preserved a centerpiece of the Affordable Care Act, ruling the Obama administration can continue to subsidize health-insurance purchases by lower-income Americans across the country.
By a 6-3 vote, the decision puts President Barack Obama’s signature domestic policy achievement on a firmer footing for the remainder of his time in office and marks the second time in four years an attempt to gut the law has fallen short in the courts.
The Affordable Care Act has a perplexing problem: Many uninsured Americans prefer their old ways of getting health care.
For millions, arranging treatment through cash, barter and charity is still better than paying for insurance.
Today the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the administration to allow Obamacare subsidies to flow through HealthCare.gov. This is a disappointment for the rule of law and for the states that have fought to keep some of Obamacare’s flawed policies out of their states.
Here’s how the 2016 presidential contenders reacted on Twitter to the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold a major component of the Obamacare health law.
Now, it’s time for Obamacare opponents and partial critics to move on to the next play. That’s in the political, not the judicial, arena. Elections, and following though on campaign promises, matter.
The law and its regulatory mutations still don’t and won’t work well. More disappointments in what the ACA exchanges produce are ahead, and the reach of the law’s many contradictory and ill-founded ambitions has already reached a high-water mark. Returning our health care system back to a better place will take more time and incremental effort. But it still can and will happen. The old-fashioned way. First by containing the scope and scale of future harm. And then by peeling back the worst parts of this law through legislative and (future) executive branch means, piece by piece.
A guest post on The Washington Post’s Volokh Conspiracy blog has Washington buzzing about a possible outcome of the Supreme Court decision on King v Burwell.
James Blumstein, University professor of constitutional law and health law and policy at Vanderbilt Law School and director of the Vanderbilt Health Policy Center, explains in his article, “Why the procedural posture of King v. Burwell might matter.”