Obamacare and The Virus

 

The 2010 health care law — also known as Obamacare — is before the court yet again, in a case known as California v. Texas. As in the earlier cases, conservative lawyers and state officials are asking the justices to invalidate the law.

The details get technical, but the bottom line is that the justices appear likely to uphold the law, based on their questions during oral arguments in November.

(Those technical details: In 2012, the court upheld the law’s health-insurance mandate on the grounds that it was a tax and that Congress clearly has the authority to levy taxes. Since then, Congress and President Donald Trump reduced the amount of the tax to zero. As a result, the conservative lawyers argue that the mandate is no longer a tax and no longer constitutional — and that the entire law should be thrown out.)

“If they strike down the law, that would be huge,” Adam says, “but nobody seems to think they’re going to.”

The repeated Obamacare rulings do help polish the court’s image: A Republican-dominated court gets multiple chances to uphold the same Democratic accomplishment. The Virus As the U.S. starts to look past the pandemic, many families are dealing with a lonely kind of grief. Dogs are being trained to detect the coronavirus. “The smell is obvious, just like grilled meat for us,” one researcher said. The C.D.C. has changed its recommendations for summer camps, saying children mostly don’t need masks outdoors. Covid shots are free. Some unvaccinated adults don’t believe that.