The legal push is sure to be an important political battleground in the presidential election.
The Republican House and Senate (in 2017 the Republicans owned both chambers) revoked the “individual mandate” clause of the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. Obamacare), which required that you pay a penalty to the federal government if you did not buy health insurance. The GOP argument was that this was the most unpopular part of Obamacare. Trump’s lawyers are now arguing that without the individual mandate, the remainder of the act makes no sense, and is unconstitutional. This is the literal truth of how we got here.
Obamacare was introduced because health care costs had risen fast, and were still going up fast, to the point where 20% of the country couldn’t get health insurance. Partly that was the job market, which for the last 40 years has been paying less and less, and transitioning from employer-employee to employer-independent contractor job rolls. The rest of it is America’s senseless health care payment arrangement, which we’ve chosen to structure as a job benefit. The way the thing is rigged, nobody has any incentive or ability to control costs, and the costs rise, because people in health care like to make more money.
