Arizona is on the list of states that wants the ACA to be repealed
Last week the federal government filed a brief asking the Supreme Court to overturn the Affordable Care Act. If successful, about 300,000 Arizonans would lose health coverage.
Protections would be lost for more than 2.7 million Arizonans with pre-existing conditions. Insurance companies would once again be allowed to deny coverage to people who have reached their lifetime limits. 20,000 young adults in Arizona would not be allowed to remain on a parent’s health insurance plan until the age of 26.
Insurance companies would no longer be required to cover the 10 Essential Health Benefits and protections would be stripped from people with employer-based health coverage, those on a Marketplace plans, and families who use Medicaid, Medicare and/or KidsCare.
The US Supreme Court is set to hear the California v. Texas lawsuit (that’s new name for it) in the coming months. Arizona is among the states that has signed on urging the court to overturn the ACA. You can click here to sign onto the letter urging the Attorney General to drop AZ from the list of states that wants to overturn the ACA.
The ACA has a Higher Risk of Being Overturned Than You Realize
The US Supreme Court has a different cast of characters than it did when the ACA was originally upheld back in 2012 by a 5-4 vote. Since then, Gorsuch replaced Scalia and Kavanaugh replaced Kennedy. Both Scalia and Kennedy voted against the ACA- so not much on that score has changed.
Chief Justice Roberts voted with the majority that upheld the law. His argument rested on the ACA’s link to the financial penalties for not having health insurance. But remember, the financial penalties for not having health insurance were removed from the IRS tax codes in the federal tax overhaul a few years ago, pulling out the structure that Roberts used in his argument.
In the 2012 Ruling, Justice Roberts wrote that: “… the Affordable Care Act’s requirement that certain individuals pay a financial penalty for not obtaining health insurance may reasonably be characterized as a tax… because the Constitution permits such a tax, it is not our role to forbid it, or to pass upon its wisdom or fairness.”
Roberts rejected the Administration’s argument that the federal government’s authority to regulate interstate commerce provides the authority needed for the ACA to be constitutional (the Court struck down that argument 5-4).
The bottom line is that the ACA, including its protections for folks with pre-existing conditions, may very well be in jeopardy if Roberts views the ACA as fundamentally different now that the financial penalties are gone.
