After the 5th Circuit Court announced their decision in the Trump-Republican lawsuit that puts the future of Americans’ health care at grave risk, legal experts and editorial boards were quick to weigh in with near-universal condemnation of the court’s ruling.
Washington Post // Editorial Board: Republicans, end this bizarre, belated crusade against Obamacare “Since the collapse of repeal-and-replace, one could imagine that Republicans’ anti-Obamacare fever had finally broken. But the Trump administration and its allies are pressing one last, desperate attempt to unravel the law…”
New York Times // Editorial Board: The Legal Threat to Obamacare Is Back. Again. “Maybe that was the plan all along: to mire the future of Obamacare in litigation, and thus provide Republicans a lifeline on an issue that cost them dearly in the 2018 election. They can continue to degrade the vital protections of Obamacare without taking responsibility for repealing and replacing it, as they so often promised they would.”
Minnesota Star Tribune // Editorial Board: Legal Threat To ACA Ought To Be Front And Center In 2020 Election. “But it’s President Donald Trump and Republicans who should shoulder the responsibility for planning for the chaos the law’s demise could cause. Eliminating the ACA has been something close to a GOP political holy grail. Yet replacement plans offered up, such as those authored by Congressional Republicans in 2017, would result in far fewer Americans having insurance. The ACA is in real jeopardy. Those who put it there owe the nation a serious game plan to clean up the mess they worked to create.”
Philadelphia Inquirer // Robert Field: Americans’ Health Care – And Pre-existing Condition Coverage – Is Again At Risk. “Losing the entire ACA would create chaos throughout the health care system. It could also undermine the integrity of the legal system, since courts would have succeeded in overturning a major piece of legislation without a coherent justification. Of course, neither outcome seems to concern the law’s opponents or the judges who have most recently ruled against it.”
NBC News // Leah Litman: Obamacare ruling voiding part of health care law as unconstitutional is a sick joke “The appellate court decision handed down Wednesday on the Affordable Care Act is a joke, but the people who depend on the ACA for health insurance won’t be laughing.”
New York Times // Abbe R. Gluck: Who Should You Blame if You Lose Your Health Care? “The average American may not realize it because the decision was paused pending appeal, but the consequences of eliminating the health law will be staggering.”
The Atlantic // Nicholas Bagley: A Case That Should Have Been Laughed Out of Court May Kill Obamacare. “The case is a partisan stunt that’s been roundly condemned by lawyers on both sides of the aisle. It should’ve been laughed out of contention long ago. The opinion from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit is an embarrassment, both to the Republican-appointed judges who put their names to it and to the federal judiciary as a whole.”