Obamacare Here to Stay: Supreme Court Allows Healthcare Subsidies for All

Obamacare has been saved by the Supreme Court in a 6-3 decision. The highest court ruled in favor of The Affordable Care Act, enabling millions of Americans to retain their health care subsidies. The ruling impacts not only consumers, but also insurers, doctors and hospitals.

“Five years ago, after nearly a century of talk, decades of trying, a year of bipartisan debate, we finally declared that in America, health care is not a privilege for a few but a right for all,” said President Obama. “This morning the court upheld a critical part of its law, the part that’s made it easier for Americans to afford health insurance regardless of where you live. If the partisan challenge to the law had succeeded, millions of Americans would have had thousands of dollars of tax credits taken from them. America would have gone backwards,” he went on to say. “The Affordable Care Act is here to stay”

Chief Justice John Roberts, who was under fire for saving the law from a major constitutional challenge in a decision that stunned pundits and politicos across the ideological spectrum in 2012, was a main factor in the result of today’s Affordable Care Act. Additionally, this ruling is significant in that it cannot be overturned by a future administration, which may be opposed to the ACA based on the Supreme Court’s specific ruling.

“Congress passed the Affordable Care Act to improve health insurance markets, not to destroy them,” Roberts wrote in the majority opinion. “If at all possible, we must interpret the Act in a way that is consistent with the former, and avoids the latter,” Roberts said.

He joined Chief Justice Anthony Kennedy and the liberals in this life-changing decision.

Opponents felt the government should not give out subsidies to those living in states without health insurance exchanges. The IRS interpretation says that tax credits are available to individuals in states that have a federal exchange. Challengers believe the words “established by the State” to mean that those 34 states without health care marketplaces should not be provided subsidies by the government.

As for the 2016 presidential candidates’ opinions, Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton exclaimed her support for the recent decision:

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush said he was “disappointed” by the ruling.”

“But this decision is not the end of the fight against Obamacare,” he said. “As President of the United States, I would make fixing our broken healthcare system one of my top priorities.”

Michael Carvin, attorney for opposers, spoke out about the matter saying,

“If the rule of law means anything, it is that text is not infinitely malleable, and that agencies must follow the law as written—not revise it to ‘better achieve’ what they assume to have been Congress’s purposes,”

In contrast, solicitor Generald Donald B. Verrilli, Jr., who won over the justices, rebutted that subsides have, since the beginning, been implied for everyone whether or not individuals reside in a state without markets. He stated that had the opposing side triumphed, states with federally-run exchanges

“would face the very death spirals the Act was structured to avoid and insurance coverage for millions of their residents would be extinguished.”

Image: Via Flickr/Will O’Neill