Trump Files Brief Urging Supreme Court To Invalidate Entire Affordable Care Act, Promising Better Plan Will Be Released Two Weeks From Some Future Date

WASHINGTON. The Trump administration informed the Supreme Court Thursday that it remains committed to invalidating the Affordable Care Act in its entirety, filing a brief that argues the 2010 health care law cannot be salvaged in any form, and adding that the timing happens to coincide with the deadliest respiratory pandemic in a century.

The filing urges the justices to declare the entire statute unconstitutional, including provisions protecting roughly 130 million Americans with pre-existing conditions, the Medicaid expansion covering more than 12 million people, and the marketplace subsidies sustaining coverage for an additional 11 million. The brief notes that this position remains unchanged despite the ongoing public health emergency, the spring collapse of employer-sponsored insurance for several million laid-off workers, and the agency's own continuing inability to articulate any specific replacement.

"We are confident this is the right moment," said an administration official, declining to specify what factor of the moment qualified it as right.

President Trump, asked at a White House briefing to outline the replacement plan he has spent years promising, said his administration would be releasing a "phenomenal" health care proposal "in about two weeks," a timeframe he first announced in 2017 and has updated at approximately two-week intervals since. He added that the plan would protect pre-existing conditions through an unspecified mechanism that did not require any of the provisions of the law his Justice Department was simultaneously asking the Supreme Court to nullify.

Public health experts noted that the administration is currently asking Americans to rely on hospital capacity, expanded telehealth access, and outpatient pharmacy networks largely funded through Medicaid, marketplace subsidies, and other ACA mechanisms whose continued existence is the subject of the brief. A senior HHS official, asked how stripping coverage from roughly 20 million Americans during a pandemic squared with administration messaging, replied that the question presupposed the administration had messaging.

The case, Texas v. California, will be argued before the Supreme Court the week after the November election.

At press time, the President was tweeting that the Affordable Care Act had been a disaster and that he had personally saved it.