Lots of reaction to the Supreme Court's landmark decision to uphold a key part of the Affordable Care Act. We begin with an op-ed by
Secretary of Health & Human Services Sylvia Burwell, writing at CNN:
For the second time, the highest court in the land has upheld a key provision of the Affordable Care Act, and that gives us a chance to chart a new course.
The ACA has delivered results that matter to people. It is working to improve access, affordability and the quality of health care. [...] Our nation deserves better than returning to the past. We can seize this opportunity for transformation. And if we're successful, we'll leave a legacy of better care and a stronger economy for our children and grandchildren.
Paul Krugman:
Now, you might wonder why a law that works so well and does so much good is the object of so much political venom — venom that is, by the way, on full display in Justice Antonin Scalia’s dissenting opinion, with its rants against “interpretive jiggery-pokery.” But what conservatives have always feared about health reform is the possibility that it might succeed, and in so doing remind voters that sometimes government action can improve ordinary Americans’ lives.
That’s why the right went all out to destroy the Clinton health plan in 1993, and tried to do the same to the Affordable Care Act. But Obamacare has survived, it’s here, and it’s working. The great conservative nightmare has come true. And it’s a beautiful thing.
Much more below the fold.
The New York Times:
On Thursday morning, for the second time in three years, a majority of the Supreme Court rightly rejected a blatantly political effort to destroy the Affordable Care Act. The case challenging the law, King v. Burwell, was always an ideological farce dressed in a specious legal argument, and the court should never have taken review of it to begin with. [...] Putting aside for the moment the rank politics swirling around the Affordable Care Act — the partisan grandstanding and the questions about President Obama’s legacy — consider what the law has already managed to accomplish.
It has been a remarkable success. Today, a larger proportion of working-age Americans have health insurance than at any time since record-keeping began in 1997. The number of people under 65 who were uninsured dropped to 16.3 percent in 2014, down four points from 2013. The drop was significantly greater in states that expanded Medicaid through the health reform law than in those that did not.
This is one of the things government was built to do: provide all Americans with access to quality, affordable and often-lifesaving health care. And this is what those who are determined to gut the law have been trying to dismantle. It is to the Supreme Court’s credit that in this case, the majority of justices managed to stay above the politics of this issue and do their job — which is to interpret the law Congress wrote in its entirety, not to rewrite it.
Bloomberg's editors:
This game was always pretty silly, and now it's all but pointless. Rather than continue to search for ways to convince voters or the courts that Obamacare is fundamentally flawed or structurally deficient, members of Congress need to cooperate and address the law's shortcomings -- which are real but surmountable.
That means finding solutions for the millions of Americans who still can't afford health insurance, but still don't qualify for federal assistance. It also means putting realistic limits on deductibles, copays and other types of cost-sharing, so people can use the insurance they have.
Ryan Cooper at The Week:
Roberts' clear account of ObamaCare's policy mechanism, and the damage that would be done should any of its main prongs be removed, deals a body blow to the conservative health care wonks who have been trying to cook up a replacement policy for the last five years — in particular, a plan without the unpopular individual mandate. But as Roberts plainly shows, that leads straight to disaster.
It's an implicit concession that ObamaCare is the most conservative possible policy that could get even close to universal coverage — if five years of Republican policy failure weren't enough evidence.
CNN's
Jeffrey Toobin:
What do the ruling and the reaction to it tell us about the Court -- particularly Chief Justice Roberts?
Toobin: The case put Roberts on the spot with the Republicans who were his most ardent supporters and who opposed Obamacare. But I think it shows that Roberts was (a) a down-the-middle judge and (b) the case was a pretty easy one at the end of the day. Not a single member of Congress supported the plaintiff's interpretation of the law during the congressional debate over Obamacare; it's hard to imagine the court would have imposed that view after the fact.
Why does a court with a conservative majority wind up disappointing conservatives as often as it has?
Toobin: This remains a conservative court. Just recall the rulings undermining the Voting Rights Act and on Citizens United and all the other decisions deregulating American politics. But Roberts is an establishment conservative who is not interested in throwing millions of people off health care until the law genuinely compels it. As for same-sex rights, it's really just Anthony Kennedy's court -- he has joined with the liberals on gay rights issues for years, and he's responsible for that entire area of the law. Kennedy was also part of the majority that upheld subsidies--and he is also an establishment conservative.
The Denver Post:
To get rid of the ACA now would require a Republican sweep in 2016 that kept that party in control of the House and Senate while also seizing the presidency — and even then the GOP wouldn't likely have the 60 votes needed in the Senate to act.
The ACA will be reformed over the coming years — and should be — but it's not fated to be repealed.
Jay Bookman at The Atlanta Journal Constitution:
I suspect that a lot of GOP politicians in Washington and here in Atlanta are breathing a big sigh of relief. The ruling allows them to continue to pretend to have a better alternative to ObamaCare, without having to explain what that alternative would be or attempt to pass it. [...]
As a result of today’s ruling, we can now turn our attention back to Congress and the Republicans who control it. If they want to repeal and replace ObamaCare, as they have claimed for the past five years, they still have the power to at least put their alternative on President Obama’s desk. Yes, he would veto it. But the American people would then have a stark choice — ObamaCare, or the option put forth by the GOP — and the 2016 presidential election could become a referendum on those two alternatives.
But we all know that will not happen. It will not happen because the Republicans have no alternative. Even among themselves, within the House and Senate Republican caucuses, they cannot come to a consensus about the approach to take. Reaching such a consensus would require Republicans to compromise with Republicans, and even that they cannot do.
Robert Schapiro at TIME:
[Justice Scalia's] vituperation reaches a crescendo in the conclusion where he snipes, “We should start calling this law SCOTUScare.”
One can debate the appropriate moniker for the ACA, and one can debate whether we should call this the Roberts Court or the Kennedy Court, but what is beyond debate is that this is not the Scalia Court.