Friday, 26 June 2020

Trump demands Supreme Court kill Affordable Care Act, aka 'Obamacare'

Late Thursday night, amid a coronavirus pandemic that has now killed over 120,000 Americans, Donald Trump's administration made new moves to take away healthcare from working Americans.

The Trump administration told the Supreme Court late Thursday that the Affordable Care Act (ACA, or "Obamacare") is invalid, including the protections it provides for people with “pre-existing conditions,” like asthma, diabetes, cancer, and the long-term damaging health effects of COVID-19.

In the filing Thursday, U.S. Solicitor Gen. Noel Francisco said, “The individual mandate no longer can be construed and upheld as a valid exercise of Congress’s taxing power because Congress eliminated the tax.”

From Bloomberg News:

Filing a brief late Thursday in a case the court is set to hear around the time of the November election, the administration said “the entire ACA thus must fall” because of a tax law change made by the Republican-controlled Congress in 2017.

The administration is backing efforts by Republican-controlled states to invalidate the 2010 law, which is being defended by 20 other states and the District of Columbia. A federal appeals court found part of the measure unconstitutional and left doubt about the rest of it.

Trump’s presumptive opponent in the November election, Democrat Joe Biden, said earlier Thursday that the president would let insurers drop coverage for people with asthma, diabetes, cancer and complications from Covid-19.

Trump is trying “to strip health coverage away from tens of millions of families, and to strip the peace of mind away from more than 100 million people with pre-existing conditions,” Biden said at a campaign event in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

More at Bloomberg:
Trump Administration Urges Court to Topple Affordable Care Act



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