A new issue brief from the Kaiser Family Foundation looks at the potential impact of the case pending before the Supreme Court related to the Affordable Care Act. The case of California v. Texas centers on the issue of the constitutionality of the ACA’s individual mandate. Previously, the Supreme Court had ruled that the individual mandate was a constitutional exercise of Congress’s taxing authority, but the tax penalty has since been eliminated as part of the 2017 tax cuts. Based on this fact, Texas and other states are arguing that the ACA is now unconstitutional.
The California v. Texas case will be heard by the Supreme Court in November and if the court determines that the individual mandate of the ACA is unconstitutional, it will then need to wrestle with whether this invalidates just the individual mandate or the whole ACA, including the consumer protections such as the prohibition against denial of coverage for pre-existing conditions. The issue brief from Kaiser looks at many of the various provisions of the ACA and discusses the potential impact if these provisions are also determined to be unconstitutional.