Industry News

On June 17, 2021, the U.S. Supreme Court again rejected an Affordable Care Act (ACA) lawsuit filed by a group of Republican State Attorneys General which claimed that a change made by Congress in 2017 had rendered the entire law unconstitutional. However, by a vote of 7-2, the Supreme Court Justices did not reach the merits of the case. Rather, they ruled that the suing states and their two individual plaintiffs from Texas lacked ‘standing’ to bring the case to court.

An excerpt from the syllabus in California v. Texas (No. 19-840) provided by the Supreme Court stated that the two individual plaintiffs “do not have standing to challenge Section 5000A(a)’s minimum essential coverage provision because they have not shown a past or future injury fairly traceable to defendants’ conduct enforcing the specific statutory provision they attack as unconstitutional…. The States, like the individual plaintiffs, have failed to show how that alleged harm is traceable to the Government’s actual or possible action in enforcing Section 5000A(a), so they lack Article III standing as a matter of law. But the States have also not shown that the challenged minimum essential coverage provision, without any prospect of penalty, will injure them by leading more individuals to enroll in these programs.”

The Supreme Court’s syllabus in California v. Texas is available here.