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Victorious Obama says healthcare law 'here to stay'
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By Arun KumarWashington, June 25
As the US Supreme Court
handed President Barack Obama a huge victory by upholding his signature
healthcare law that opposition Republicans have tried to repeal
countless times, he vowed to make it even better.
"Five years
ago, after nearly a century of talk, decades of trying, a year of
bipartisan debate, we finally declared that in America, healthcare is
not a privilege for a few but a right for all," Obama said from the
White House on Thursday shortly after the verdict.
"Americans
would have gone backwards and that's not what we do, that's not what
America does, we move forward," he said praising the apex court's
decision to uphold the subsidies in the law, nicknamed "Obamacare".
"The
Affordable Care Act is here to stay," Obama said of the law that has
extended cover to more than 15 million Americans who didn't have health
insurance before it was signed into law in 2010.
In a 6-3
decision, the court held the 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
health insurance marketplaces 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, the
challengers 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.
All the
Republican presidential candidates have vowed to repeal 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.
Several other Republican presidential
candidates quickly denounced the ruling with a "disappointed" front
runner Jeb Bush saying "this decision is not the end of the fight
against Obamacare".
But Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton took to Twitter to praise the decision.
"Yes!"
she tweeted. "SCOTUS affirms what we know is true in our hearts &
under the law: Health insurance should be affordable & available to
all."
(Arun Kumar can be contacted at [email protected])