Photo credit: Brad Schimel's Facebook page
With all the recent distractions of President Donald Trump threatening war with Canada and publicly declaring his love for a murderous little North Korean dictator, it was easy to miss the news about the latest Republican attempt to destroy affordable health care in America. But everyone in Wisconsin should be aware that their state’s Republican governor, Scott Walker, and attorney general, Brad Schimel, are leading another attempt to eliminate all the most popular protections under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), including the widely supported provision preventing insurance companies from denying coverage or charging exorbitant premiums for anyone with a preexisting medical condition.
That may surprise a lot of people since, during the repeated Republican attempts to destroy the ACA last year, Trump and congressional Republicans always promised to retain the provisions that even members of their own party overwhelmingly supported. Besides, everyone remembers Arizona Sen. John McCain’s famous “thumbs down” vote that ended all those cruel Republican attempts to destroy health care for tens of millions of Americans.
For a while, it seemed like all Republicans actually accomplished with their relentless votes to destroy health care was to make voters much more aware of all the protections of the ACA they really didn’t want to lose. According to polling by the Kaiser Family Foundation, large majorities in both political parties supported subsidies for lower- and middle-class Americans buying individual insurance, ending the routine practice of charging women higher premiums than men, requiring insurance to cover a set of basic health benefits and, above all, prohibiting insurance companies from cancelling policies when people get sick and then refusing to cover preexisting conditions or charging exorbitant premiums to those individuals most desperately in need of coverage.
Sabotaging Health Care
So, now that Republicans are no longer publicly voting to destroy affordable health care, everyone can breathe a sigh of relief, right? Not for a moment. Trump and Republicans really never stopped their behind-the-scenes sabotage of the ACA. And that’s where Walker and Schimel come in with one of the most serious threats yet to all the law’s health care protections.
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Since it’s an election year, Walker hypocritically pretended to be concerned about possible “catastrophic” increases of 90% in the rates of ACA insurance plans in Wisconsin experts are predicting over the next three years as a result of continuing Republican sabotage of the ACA. Walker got the state legislature to allocate $200 million to hold down those rate increases.
It was a stunning act of political dishonesty, since the governor simultaneously authorized Schimel to jointly lead a federal lawsuit (along with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton) supported by Wisconsin and 19 other Republican-led states that once again seeks to have the entire ACA declared unconstitutional. That would immediately destroy all the protections and federal subsidies that hold down health care costs for nearly 30 million Americans.
But wait a minute. The U.S. Supreme Court twice upheld the constitutionality of the ACA and its provisions—first in 2012 by a 5-4 vote and in a separate case in 2015 by 6-3. In both cases, conservative Chief Justice John Roberts wrote both majority decisions upholding the law. So, what’s changed?
Where’s the Logic?
The logic is extremely convoluted, but Schimel and Paxton claim that the obscene $1.5 trillion tax cut Republicans passed last year didn’t just give the overwhelming share of those enormous tax cuts to billionaires, millionaires and multimillion-dollar corporations, but they claim it also completely destroyed the constitutionality of the ACA. That’s because Roberts ruled the health care law was constitutional based on the federal government’s taxing authority.
Schimel and Paxton claim Republicans destroyed that constitutional basis for the ACA when their tax law eliminated financial penalties for anyone violating the ACA’s individual mandate requiring everyone to buy health insurance. No taxes, no more health care law—and no more benefits of any kind, including coverage for preexisting conditions or government subsidies to make insurance affordable.
It’s an absurd legal stretch, but that might not matter. That’s because U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions publicly announced the federal government will no longer defend the law in that Republican lawsuit before a Republican federal judge in Texas who has ruled against the ACA in the past. Sessions acknowledges ignoring the Justice Department’s “longstanding tradition of defending the constitutionality of duly enacted statutes if reasonable arguments can be made in their defense.” Apparently, Sessions couldn’t think of a single reasonable argument to support all the promises by Trump and congressional Republicans to protect Americans from ever being denied coverage or charged excessive premiums because of preexisting conditions.
Normally, replacing a Democratic administration with a Republican one has never automatically changed all of the nation’s laws and legal protections. But Trump’s government has never been a normal one. Wisconsin voters can do their part to preserve America’s health care protections—including coverage for preexisting conditions—by removing Walker and Schimel from office this November.
