Sabotaging the ACA

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Trump is fanatically trying to end Obamacare in court cases. Twenty million people, at least, will lose health insurance. He has no replacement. As a Yale University study just demonstrated, 65,000 to over 100,000 Americans die every year because they do not have health insurance (see the Yale study here). 

Here are 8 coronavirus failures that prove Trump is a clear and present danger to the United States: Ralph Nader – Alternet.org

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President Trump on Friday teased an executive order to require health insurers to cover all preexisting conditions, something already established under the Affordable Care Act, which his administration is suing to dismantle.

Trump teases order requiring insurers to cover preexisting conditions | TheHill

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Ten years after the passage of the Affordable Care Act, the Trump administration is now asking the Supreme Court to overturn it. Yet it’s now clear that the ACA has brought significant improvements to the lives of millions of Americans. Today, they enjoy more health care coverage, with greater access, better outcomes and less cost. One segment in particular gained the most: pre-Medicare adults from ages 50 to 64. Before the ACA, the number of uninsured in that group reached 8.9 million people. Insurance companies rejected more than one in five of their applications. Those who remained uninsured received fewer basic clinical services. They were more likely to experience health declines. But after passage of the ACA, 5.6 million of them – 9% of the 62 million in the pre-Medicare group – purchased coverage in the individual health insurance market. As a result, their uninsured rate fell from over 14% in 2013 to less than 9% in 2018. Now the new question: Have there been improvements in the health status for the pre-Medicare population? If so, they would likely be somewhat more resilient to COVID-19. So both of us began to analyze data from the Health and Retirement Study, and tracked changes in the group’s well-being. We chose the years 2010 and 2016.

Trump is still trying to destroy Obamacare — but it’s been a crucial lifeline during the pandemic – Alternet.org

• Obamacare has been critical for Covid patients...
  

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While the ACA's fate is still uncertain — many legal experts in both parties think the lawsuit’s arguments are so weak that even conservative justices would uphold the law — the consequences of it being struck down would reverberate through almost every corner of the health care system. “It’s an enormous disruption,” said Larry Levitt, a health policy expert at the Kaiser Family Foundation. “It would result in immediate chaos in the health care system.” Here’s a rundown of what would happen if ObamaCare is struck down.

What's at stake if the Supreme Court rules against ObamaCare | TheHill

What are these consequences:

• 20M people would lose healthcare coverage (in the midst of a pandemic) and this is probably a low estimate
  
• Protection of pre-existing conditions is gone. Almost half of the US population has a preexisting condition, even Covid is a preexisting condition.
  
• Children up to age 26 can no longer stay on their parents plans
  
• Tax cuts would mainly benefit the wealthy
  
• A whole range of other things..
  

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A 2017 government study reported about 133 million Americans under age 65 would have to pay extra for insurance coverage - or be denied outright - due to a pre-existing condition if the ACA is overturned. That's close to half the US population, with conditions ranging from obesity to substance abuse to Alzheimer's..

US election 2020: Lives that could be reshaped by Supreme Court - BBC News

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The Trump administration on Sunday evening approved Georgia’s proposal to eliminate the federal healthcare.gov website as a path to enroll in health insurance, instead directing people to private brokers and insurers. The Trump administration and Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp ® argue the move will increase innovation from the private sector, but Democrats denounced the move as creating confusion for consumers that will result in some people losing coverage.  The move would make Georgia the first state to have no government-run website to enroll in ObamaCare coverage.

Trump officials approve Georgia plan to remove healthcare.gov as enrollment option | TheHill

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A team of conservative activists filed a lawsuit last year that asks the courts to strike down several key provisions of the Affordable Care Act. The plaintiffs’ legal arguments are at odds with longstanding precedents, but the case is assigned to a very conservative Republican-appointed judge. And that judge has already signaled that he’s likely to rule in those plaintiffs’ favor.

Kelley v. Becerra is the fourth round of litigation attacking major provisions of the Affordable Care Act. It seeks to take out several provisions of Obamacare governing which forms of preventive care — things like birth control or vaccinations or cancer screenings — must be covered by health insurers. And it primarily relies on the kind of legal arguments that fell out of vogue in the federal courts more than 80 years ago.

But there’s a twist. Though the primary legal argument in Kelley is tough to square with existing legal precedents, five members of the Supreme Court recently signaled that they intend to abandon longstanding legal principles in favor of the same interpretation of the Constitution proposed by the Kelley plaintiffs.

The case, which was filed in a federal court in Texas, is being heard by Judge Reed O’Connor, a former Republican Capitol Hill staffer who once ruled that the Affordable Care Act must be repealed in its entirety. (That case is now before the Supreme Court, and a majority of the Court appeared likely to reject key parts of O’Connor’s arguments when the case was argued last November.)

Supreme Court: A new lawsuit attacking Obamacare is a serious threat to the law - Vox

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Judge Reed O’Connor, a former Republican Capitol Hill staffer who now sits on a federal district court in Texas, is one of the most notorious names in US health policy circles. He’s best known for a 2018 decision that attempted to repeal the Affordable Care Act in its entirety — before O’Connor was smacked down 7-2 by the Supreme Court.
So when a new attack on Obamacare arrived in O’Connor’s courtroom, this time on the part of the law requiring health insurers to fully cover certain preventive medical treatments, it appeared inevitable that O’Connor would deal yet another blow to the 2010 law. On Wednesday, that blow came. O’Connor’s order in Braidwood Management v. Becerra, effectively neutralizes part — but not all — of this requirement on insurers...

O’Connor’s decision is likely to lead to needless health complications and preventable deaths. For one, O’Connor explicitly says that employers with religious objections may offer health plans that do not cover pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), drugs that are very effective in preventing the transmission of HIV. And if O’Connor’s decision stands, it is likely to force at least some health care consumers to pay out of pocket for cancer screenings that otherwise would have been covered by their insurer, potentially causing patients to delay those screenings until it is too late. (Though it should be noted that O’Connor has not yet issued an injunction against the law, so Obamacare remains in full effect, for the moment.)

Moreover, it is likely that higher courts will make more expansive attacks on the Affordable Care Act as this case is appealed. O’Connor may have stayed his hand somewhat because he was bound by an appeals court’s precedent. But neither the conservative US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit nor the Supreme Court — where Republican appointees have a 6-3 supermajority — are necessarily going to heed that precedent. And the plaintiffs raise just the kind of argument that could entice the Supreme Court to upend the preventive care requirements altogether.

Obamacare is under attack by GOP judges again. Here’s what’s at stake in Braidwood Management v. Becerra. - Vox

• Still difficult to get one's head around the fact of these rightwingers efforts to do away with healthcare coverage and in this case, preventive care.
  
• Ideology kills again..
  

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Reed O’Connor should have to carry a Surgeon General’s warning: This federal judge may be hazardous to your health. O’Connor, a George W. Bush appointee, is a federal district judge in Texas, and he has it in for the Affordable Care Act. In 2018, on the flimsiest of rationales, he declared the entire Obama-era statute unconstitutional. That ruling was eventually overturned by the Supreme Court, on the grounds that Texas didn’t have standing to challenge the law. But O’Connor is back at it, this time going after one of the ACA’s most successful and popular provisions: the requirement that insurers cover preventive services without additional costs, such as requiring co-payments or applying deductibles... 

It is common sense — buttressed by numerous studies — that people are more likely to seek preventive care when they don’t have to pay out of pocket for it. This incentive, as Congress found in enacting the Affordable Care Act, isn’t just good for individuals — it’s good for society, helping to head off illness and lower overall health-care costs. So millions of Americans have relied on this coverage for everything from cancer screening to efforts to head off diabetes and cardiovascular disease. According to a friend-of-the-court brief filed by the American Medical Association, 233 million individuals are enrolled in health plans — employer-sponsored coverage, plans available in the ACA marketplace, Medicare or Medicaid — that are subject to the preventive care rules.

This federal judge may be hazardous to your health