After the election, the Supreme Court will decide whether the Affordable Care Act is constitutional; if the court rules it’s not, then the protections the ACA has afforded to millions of Americans with pre-existing conditions will disappear.
It took years, a series of votes spearheaded by Republicans, and multiple legal rulings in a variety of states to get to here.
Liberals believe that the confirmation of a new justice, namely, Amy Coney Barrett, means the ACA’s imminent death since Barrett is on the record criticizing justices who defended the law in the past.
The issue is definitely a hot-button in the North Country where Republican Congresswoman Elise Stefanik is running for a fourth term against Democrat Tedra Cobb.
When it comes to the Affordable Care Act, Stefanik has voted with her party (and some Democrats) against it multiple times. However, she told Capital Tonight that she supports coverage for pre-existing conditions.
“We must ensure that health care in this country covers pre-existing conditions,” Rep. Stefanik told Capital Tonight.
But, as the Adirondack Daily Enterprise reported on September 24, Stefanik cast a vote against the Underwood Amendment, “which would have prevented the spending of federal funds by the Department of Justice on litigation to undermine the ACA."
Stefanik has voted for some of the bills sponsored by members of her own party that would cover pre-existing conditions, but according to The Atlantic, “None of these initiatives will protect patients with preexisting health needs nearly as effectively as the ACA does, because the GOP plans still allow insurers to treat them differently from healthy patients, sometimes overtly and sometimes more subtly.”
More broadly, if the ACA is dismantled by SCOTUS, there is nothing on the table right now to replace it.
Dan McLaughlin, senior writer at the National Review Online writes, “…it is absolutely the case that the administration is unprepared for what to do immediately if the Supreme Court were to throw out significant parts of the statute…”
President Donald Trump has touted his executive order protecting health care for people with pre-existing conditions, but according to Factcheck.org, he has overstated its value.
When Capital Tonight asked Rep Stefanik if she supported the Trump administration’s decision to instruct federal agencies to suspend all diversity training until training materials are wiped of terms like “white privilege,” “systemic racism,” and “unconscious bias,” she said she did.
“I don’t support the teachings of critical race theory,” Stefanik told Capital Tonight.
Stefanik points out that she has spoken out against racist graffiti in the North Country. She stated that, “All lives matter, Black lives matter,” though she does not support the mission of the group Black Lives Matter, which she claimed was to defund the police.
Rep. Stefanik is a supporter of the Justice Act, which is sponsored by Senator Tim Scott (R-SC).