This Thursday, the United States Supreme Court ruled against a coalition of 17 Republican states led by Texas, which argued that parts of the 2010 healthcare reform law known as Obamacare is unconstitutional. This is the third time that the Supreme Court has ruled in favor of the legislation promoted by the Obama administration.
Out of the 9 judges, 7 ruled in favor of the healthcare law and 2 ruled against it; the two were Judge Samuel Alito and Judge Neil Gorsuch.
The central matter in this case was the verdict made in 2017 by the then Republican-controlled Congress to weaken one of the pillars of health care reform: the so-called “individual mandate” that mandated all Americans to buy health insurance.
In 2017, Congress zeroed out the financial consequence that resulted for those citizens who did not do so.
As a result, a union of 17 conservative states requested the Supreme Court to review the legality of Obamacare again, reasoning that the change that Congress had created, made the law unconstitutional.
Confronted with this, a coalition of 20 Democratic states led by California and New York articulated their support for Obama’s health care reform before the highest court.
In February, President Joe Biden urged the US Supreme Court to protect Obamacare, which was a change of position with respect to the Trump Administration, which wanted to repeal the law.
In response to all those arguments, the Supreme Court today argued that the allegations of the conservative states about the unconstitutionality of Obamacare are not valid and ruled against them.
The Supreme Court already ruled in favor of Obamacare in 2012 and 2015.
Many conservatives had hoped that after having a supposed conservative majority on the Supreme Court – with three additional Judges added by the Trump administration – that the court would start ruling more frequently in favor of the Conservatives, so far, that does not seem to be the case.
