Supreme Court gets it right on ACA

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Aim Indiana Media

It’s time to stop trying to kill the Affordable Care Act and focus on making it better.

In a vote last Thursday, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that 18 GOP-led states and two individuals had no right to bring a lawsuit to federal court claiming that a 2017 change to the ACA was responsible for “financial harm” they suffered.

The conservative-leaning court, which boasts three justices picked by former President Donald Trump, denied the effort to repeal the law in a 7-2 ruling; marking the third major attempt by Republicans to rescind the ACA since Congress passed it in 2010.

The lawsuit mainly questioned the elimination of the penalty for those not insured. The GOP argued that without the mandate, a pillar of the law when it was passed, the rest of the law should fall, too, the The Associated Press reported.

At this point, most Republicans no longer want to deal with the issue of health care since they don’t have an alternative proposal to replace the current system — or majority control over either chamber. If the law was going to get replaced, it would’ve happened under Trump when the GOP controlled both chambers during the first two years of his presidency.

In addition, the ACA has grown too large and popular to be taken down.

In a recent Kaiser Family Foundation tracking poll, 54% of Americans supported the ACA to 35% that disapproved of the law. In 2016, just 46% approved of it.

A total of 31 million people have health insurance thanks to the law, including 572,729 in Indiana.

Around 1.2 million people have signed up for health insurance through the ACA since President Joe Biden reopened enrollment earlier this year due to COVID-19.

If the lawsuit had gone through, it could’ve blown up the healthcare system as we know it.

Unfortunately, Indiana was one of those states signed-on to the lawsuit. Former Attorney General Curtis Hill put Indiana in the middle of it before current AG Todd Rokita was elected in 2020.

Rokita has continued to call the law “unconstitutional” and has pledged to continue to push back against Obamacare. For the sake of the taxpayers’ wallet, we hope that’s not true.

It hasn’t been the courts’ duties to rework, repeal or replace the law, and still isn’t to this day.

Rather than continuing to waste time and resources fighting the ACA, our leaders should focus on finding ways to strengthen it for all Americans.

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