President Trump on Saturday strongly backed a lawsuit that would overturn the Affordable Care Act and strip about 23 million Americans of health insurance coverage during the coronavirus pandemic.
Branding the signature achievement of President Barack Obama as “a joke,” Trump said the Supreme Court should agree with the White House and GOP governors argument that it is illegal because Congress eliminated the penalty for Americans who refuse to get health insurance.
“It can be replaced with a FAR BETTER AND MUCH LESS EXPENSIVE ALTERNATIVE,” Trump tweeted.
Trump claimed that he would “ALWAYS, ALWAYS” protect “preexisting conditions.” But the requirement that insurance companies accept people with preexisting would be eliminated if the court does what he wants and strikes down Obamacare.
Despite a decade of fierce denunciations of Obamacare, neither Trump nor Republican lawmakers have ever settled on a plan to replace it.
The outburst came after Solicitor General Noel Francisco filed an unusual Thursday night brief backing the complicated legal push by Republican states to end Obamacare, which provides insurance for those who cannot obtain private coverage.
The Supreme Court will rule whether an appeals court acted properly when it said that Congress effectively called for the elimination of the health law when it reduced the penalty for violating the so-called individual mandate to zero dollars.
The top court based an earlier ruling upholding Obamacare on the reasoning that it was actually a tax, adding significance to the move to eliminate the penalty that the justices had said was akin to a tax.
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