Obama Delivers Sweeping Defense of Health Care Law as Ruling Looms

President Barack Obama made an impassioned defense of the Affordable Care Act on Tuesday, hailing its historic expansion of health coverage just as the Supreme Court prepares to decide a case that could strip away that coverage from millions of Americans.

“By the time I took office, thousands of Americans were losing their health insurance every single day. Many people died each year because they didn’t have health insurance. Many families who thought they had coverage were driven into bankruptcy by out-of-pocket costs,” Obama told a gathering of the Catholic Health Association, whose member hospital systems helped pass the law five years ago.

“As long as those things were happening, America was not living up to our highest ideals,” the president said.

The health care law that Obama signed in 2010 is widely credited by independent analyses with driving the largest decline in the nation’s uninsured rate in at least a half-century.

The number of Americans without coverage declined by nearly 17 million since the law’s coverage expansion began last year, nonprofit research firm RAND Corp. reported last month.

While hailing those gains, the president also offered a more personal, at times even spiritual, case for the law.

“There are the outcomes that are harder to calculate in the tally of pain and tragedy and bankruptcies that have been averted, but also in the security of a parent who can afford to take her kid to the doctor, or the dignity of a grandfather who can get the preventive care that he needs, or the freedom of an entrepreneur who can start a new venture, or the joy of a wife who thought she’d never again take her husband’s hand and go for a walk.”

The coverage gains are now jeopardized by the legal challenge before the Supreme Court, which may invalidate insurance subsidies the law provides to consumers in 37 states.

The plaintiffs in the case, backed by conservative activists, argue that a strict reading of the statute makes these subsidies available only in states that established their own insurance marketplaces, rather than having the federal government operate the marketplace for them.

The marketplaces, a cornerstone of the law, allow Americans who don’t get health benefits at work to shop online among plans that must all offer basic benefits and cannot turn away customers, even if they are sick.

Consumers making less than four times the federal poverty level —  about $47,000 for a single adult and $97,000 for a family of four — qualify for subsidies.

If the court sides with the plaintiffs, congressional Republicans have promised to offer an alternative. But GOP leaders have failed in five years to advance any alternative to the Affordable Care Act.

And just a handful of states have made plans to stave off the chaos that is widely expected to follow a ruling taking away the insurance assistance.

This article appeared in print on page 10 of the June 10th, 2015 edition of Hamodia.