Trump Justice Department Asks Supreme Court To Strike Down Entire Affordable Care Act During Pandemic, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That 20 Million Americans Were Insured While A Respiratory Virus Spread

WASHINGTON. The Department of Justice formally informed the Supreme Court on Thursday that it would like the entire Affordable Care Act struck from existence, resolving a long-standing administration concern that more than 20 million Americans were still carrying health insurance during a respiratory pandemic.

In a brief filed in the case of California v. Texas, the administration urged the Court to invalidate the law in full, arguing that because Congress had reduced the individual mandate penalty to zero dollars in its 2017 tax legislation, the mandate was now unconstitutional, and that the rest of the statute, including the protections for pre-existing conditions, the Medicaid expansion, and the insurance marketplaces, could not reasonably be expected to keep functioning without it. The filing arrived as unemployment claims pushed millions of families off employer coverage and onto the very programs the brief sought to dissolve.

"The timing was carefully considered," said one official familiar with the filing, speaking on condition of anonymity because the consideration had not gone well. "We looked at the calendar, we saw a once-in-a-century pandemic, we saw record job losses, and we asked ourselves whether this was really the moment for tens of millions of Americans to have a safety net. We concluded that it was not, and we are confident the Court will agree that now is the time."

The brief was filed as the President continued to assure the public that he would always protect Americans with pre-existing conditions, a category estimated to include as many as 133 million people and, sources noted, anyone who happened to contract the virus then circulating through the country. "We will always protect patients with pre-existing conditions, always," Trump said, declining as he had for three years running to identify the specific plan that would do the protecting.

Legal analysts described the request as ambitious, observing that the administration was asking the Court to terminate coverage for tens of millions of people without having arranged anywhere else for those people to go, an approach one scholar characterized as the policy equivalent of demolishing an occupied building and trusting the tenants to work it out. The Court would ultimately reject the challenge the following June by a vote of 7 to 2, ruling that the parties who brought it had not been injured by a penalty of zero dollars and therefore had no standing to sue, a conclusion the administration could have reached at any point in the preceding three years.

At press time, the President had reiterated that a complete and far superior healthcare plan would be released within two weeks, a deadline aides confirmed had been approximately two weeks away since 2017.