The far right is tireless in its efforts to dismantle basic protections for everyone in the U.S. Tuesday, one of the leading right-wing lawyers—known as the architect of the Texas six-week abortion ban—was in court making yet another argument to gut the Affordable Care Act. This time, the plan of attack is to take away the ACA’s requirement for insurance to cover preventive care for free, without copays.
Preventive care, of course, saves money by preventing more expensive treatments from being required. But to the people bringing the suit, originally filed in March 2020, who Politico characterize as “a group of Texas residents and employers and backed by former Trump officials,” preventive care is unacceptable because people they disapprove of might be protected. Or, as they put it, STD screenings and HIV prevention drugs “facilitate and encourage homosexual behavior, prostitution, sexual promiscuity, and intravenous drug use.”
They want people to be charged for preventive care, even though the costs of people not getting preventive care are significantly higher. It is cheaper to prevent HIV than to treat it for decades. It is cheaper to screen for HPV than to treat advanced cervical cancer. The very obvious underlying logic here is that they want people to suffer for having sex outside of heterosexual marriage.
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“The government cannot possibly show that forcing private insurers to provide PrEP drugs, the HPV vaccine, and screenings and behavioral counseling for STDs and drug use free of charge is a policy of such overriding importance that it can trump religious-freedom objections,” according to the lawsuit.
Oh really? The government doesn’t have an interest in preventing the spread of sexually transmitted diseases? But of course to these people, nothing can trump religious-freedom objections. They want Christian people to be able to wield their faith as a weapon against anyone and everyone they don’t like, to deny service and discriminate against and stigmatize whenever and wherever they wish, with the blessing of the courts. They want the second thought in the First Amendment, that “Congress shall make no law … prohibiting the free exercise” of religion, to trump the first thought, that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion,” and they want their religion, as they define it and against whom they define it, to be the religion so established.
The Biden administration is arguing in court that the people bringing the suit do not have standing to sue because they haven’t actually been harmed by other people getting preventive care without copays. Which is also true.
The suit is being brought in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas before Judge Reed O’Connor, the author of other anti-ACA opinions. Whatever the outcome, it will doubtless be appealed to the conservative Fifth Circuit and then to the conservative Supreme Court, where we will see how far Donald Trump’s justices will go on health care.
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They came for Roe. Now, one right-wing lawyer is coming for PrEP, the medicine that prevents HIV
