America
US Supreme Court upholds Obama's signature healthcare law
By
By Arun KumarWashington, June 25
In a huge victory for
President Barack Obama, the US Supreme Court on Thursday upheld his
signature healthcare law that opposition Republicans have tried to
repeal countless times.
All the Republican presidential
candidates have vowed to dump it with Louisiana's Indian American
governor Bobby Jindal making it the second of his top four objectives
after "secure our borders".
"I will replace Obamacare with a
healthcare system that focuses on reducing costs and restoring freedom,"
Jindal declared on Wednesday as he became the first Indian American and
13th Republican candidate to jump into the 2016 White House race.
In
a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court held that the Affordable Care Act
authorised federal tax subsidies to help poor and middle-class people
buy health insurance nationwide and not just in states with their own
exchanges to shop for them.
Only 16 states and the American
capital of Washington have set up their own exchanges and over 6.4
million Americans living in 34 Republican-ruled states which did not
create such market places are dependent on federal exchanges.
"Congress
passed the Affordable Care Act to improve health insurance markets, not
to destroy them," Chief Justice John Roberts, a conservative, wrote in
the majority opinion joined by another conservative and the four liberal
justices.
"If at all possible, we must interpret the Act in a way that is consistent with the former, and avoids the latter," he said.
In
a dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia said "we should start calling this
law SCOTUScare," referring to the two times the Court has saved the law.
Challenge
to the Act hinged on just four words in the law that they argued made
subsidies available only to people buying insurance on "an exchange
established by the state".
Congress made the distinction, they
said, to encourage states to create their own exchanges and when that
failed on a large scale, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) tried to
"fix" the law.
The income-based subsidies are crucial to the
law's success, helping to make health insurance more affordable and
ultimately reducing the number of uninsured Americans.
Several
Republican presidential candidates quickly denounced the ruling with
Senator Marco Rubio saying the court had "once again erred... in forcing
Obamacare on the American people".
(Arun Kumar can be contacted at [email protected])