PD Editorial: Obamacare wins again in court

The Affordable Care Act is here to stay.

The very idea may be heresy to President Barack Obama’s opponents, who have dreamed up a series of increasingly preposterous challenges to the five-year-old health care law. But Thursday’s ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court should settle the matter.

For the second time in three years, the high court affirmed the constitutionality of a law that has largely delivered on Obama’s promise to extend health insurance to millions of Americans.

Chief Justice John Roberts succinctly dismissed the current legal challenge and summarized the guiding principle of Obamacare, as the program is often called, in a single sentence: “Congress passed the Affordable Care Act to improve health insurance markets, not to destroy them,” he wrote for the majority in a 6-3 ruling.

The ruling allows the federal government to continue offering subsidies to help low- and middle-income Americans buy health insurance, regardless of where they live.

To decide otherwise would have required the court to read four words, found deep in a 900-page statute, without regard for their context or Congress’ intentions.

Opponents contend that the law authorizes subsidies only for people who buy insurance on exchanges “established by the state.” Of the 8.7 million people receiving premium subsidies, 6.4 million live in states that didn’t establish health exchanges, leaving residents to enroll through the federal marketplace.

Limiting subsidies to residents of California and 13 other states with health exchanges would have “calamitous results,” Roberts wrote.

Thursday’s decision is consistent with the court’s tradition of deferring to legislative intent and context when interpreting statutory language, but that didn’t satisfy Justice Antonin Scalia, who called the majority’s reasoning “quite absurd.”

“We really should start calling this law Scotus-care,” said Scalia, who also dissented from the 2012 decision upholding the law’s penalties for failing to purchase health insurance.

Whatever it’s called, it’s the law of the land.

Five years of real world experience refute claims that the Affordable Care Act would subject the elderly to death panels, cause the federal budget deficit to spiral out of control, entice employers to cancel insurance plans and crash the economy. Republicans in Congress have staged four dozen repeal votes without success, and legal challenges have fallen flat.

Indeed, the court may have done the GOP a favor.

More than 10 million people have obtained insurance through one of the exchanges, and polls show that most of them like their plans.

Had the ruling gone the other way, millions of people faced steep premium increases or loss of their health coverage altogether. The disruption would have extended to doctors, hospitals and insurance companies, and the backlash almost certainly would have targeted opponents of the Affordable Care Act.

Despite their incessant criticism of the landmark law, it’s clear that the GOP majority in Congress can’t muster enough votes to repeal the law, nor can it agree on an alternative.

Even if Republicans retain control of Congress and take over the White House in the 2016 election, there’s no reason to believe that they can forge a compromise between those who want to repeal the law and those who want to repeal it and replace it with a different health insurance plan.

There is room to adjust and improve the Affordable Care Act, but that effort can’t begin in earnest until opponents acknowledge that Obamacare is here to stay.