ACA hearing this week

All eyes may be on the general election, the U.S. Supreme Court is gearing up to hear a case which will decide the fate of millions of Americans’ health insurance.

The justices will begin hearing oral arguments on the Trump administration’s possibly last attempt to have the Affordable Care Act (ACA) dismantled; a priority of the Republican party since its inception in 2010.

Hear Medical Economics Senior Editor Jeffrey Bendix ask Christine Eibner, Ph.D., a Rand Corp. analyst what a ruling against the ACA would mean in an episode of Off the Chart with Medical Economics podcast.​

As previously reported, the case rests on a lower court’s ruling that the individual mandate, which required citizens to buy health insurance or face a tax penalty, was ruled unconstitutional by Judge Reed O’Connor in the Federal District Court in Fort Worth, Texas, in 2018. His ruling actually attempted to invalidate the entire law due to a 2012 Supreme Court decision on the ACA which upheld the mandate saying that it fell under Congress’ taxation powers.

The case was appealed, and at the beginning of the year the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans released a 2-1 decision to return case back to O’Connor to determine whether the mandate could be severed from the rest of the law.

Continue reading this article on Medical Economics.