WILL THE HIGHEST US COURT CONTINUE TO BE AN “ACTIVIST” COURT?

…Today’s US Supreme Court

Hopefully, one usually conservative justice will agree to vote along with the court’s four, more liberal leaning individuals.

You know, more and more I’m hearing those individuals that deal with legal issues saying that the US Supreme Court should never have taken on the current issue of the insurance exchanges for the Affordable Care Act (ACA), also known as Obamacare. 

Yes, that high-court decision should come down by the end of this month.  And yes, there is one sentence where the writers of the act made a mistake and did not say that both the state and the federal exchanges would provide the subsidies for obtaining the insurance.  But there are many other areas in the act where it is obvious that the original purpose of either a state exchange or a federal exchanges was that both would provide subsidies for purchasing affordable health insurance.

There are many of us that feel that the court's conservatives took on this case only because they would then be able to make the Democratic president squirm and they could put many Americans in fear of losing their first ever health care coverage.

Will these conservatives actually shoot down the federal insurance exchanges due to a basic typo?  No one knows?

But in reality, they are now in the position to not only take away health care coverage from 6 to 7 million Americans, there are many more problems that losing the ACA it would cause.

Obviously, the first issue would be the basic loss of the health care coverage.  And for those that could scrape up the money, they could possibly keep some or perhaps all of their coverage, but it would definitely be for a much higher monthly rate.

The secondary big issue is the affect it would have on the Republicans in the 2016 election.

The Republicans tried over 50 times to repeal Obamacare, and they attempted that repeal without offering any replacement programs.  So, the GOP will be directly blamed for taking away health care from 6-7 million Americans if the Supreme Court gives the ACA a thumbs-down decision.

That’s not exactly what a Republican politician would want to face with their constituents in their Town Meetings at home.  In addition, most of the states where Obamacare is the most important are those Red GOP states in the South and the Mid-West.

Losing the ACA would not just cause health care costs to skyrocket for millions, it would also plunge the entire American health-care system into chaos. That’s not just judicial activism, which it definitely is, but it would also be a judicially induced disaster.

Then there’s: How does the American public feel about Obamacare?

The Kaiser Family Foundation, which tracks public opinion on the matter found in April that more Americans had a favorable view of the law for the first time since 2012. The difference is not statistically significant, but the favorable view is up 10 points since the poor HealthCare.gov site was rolled out in 2013. Forty-six percent favor keeping the law as is or expanding it, compared with 41% who favor scaling it back or repealing it.  And that attitude about repealing has continued to change more to scaling it back over the past 2 years.

In addition, American health care is fading as a big political issue. In the latest Gallup Poll, it was found that only 5% of those polled called it the country’s most important problem. That percentage compares with 26% in September 2009.

The president was correct when he stated this week: “Five years in, what we are talking about is no longer just a law. It’s no longer just a theory. It isn’t even just about the Affordable Care Act or Obamacare,” he said. “This is now part of the fabric of how we care for one another. This is health care in America.”

The activist conservatives on the high court just love to give the first black president headaches.  They were probably not impressed or moved by the president’s presentation this week about the benefits of the ACA.  But understanding the havoc that would be made and the massive financial problems it would cause, the conservatives may well be reluctant to deny a law for a grammatical error that now has broad acceptance in American society.

I think Dana Milbank of the Washington Post said it best when he wrote:

“Such a cataclysm has no place in the catechism of Sister Carol Keehan, head of the Catholic Health Association and a key early supporter of Obamacare who broke with the Catholic bishops to support the law. ‘It would be unspeakably cruel,’ she said when I asked her after the conference Tuesday what an adverse Supreme Court ruling would produce. Millions of people — pregnant women, cancer victims, heart patients — would lose coverage, she said. ‘The panic is going to spread, the confusion. It’s going to be incredibly chaotic.’ And, with Congress unable to agree even on little things, the chaos would persist.

“It makes me crazy just to think of it,” Keehan said, urging me to “light a candle” as the justices prepare their opinion.”

Hopefully, at least one of the conservatives on the court will have the heart to vote with the court’s liberals and to not cause so much pain and heartache to as many as 7 million Americans. 

 

However, the court’s conservatives have been known to give the middle digit to the American public before.  So both my fingers and my toes are already crossed for those American’s in need of their recently acquired health care coverage.

Copyright G.Ater  2015