SCOTUS Starts Hearings On Obamacare. Here’s What You Need To Know.

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court began hearing oral arguments on a challenge to the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) in the case California v. Texas. The case revolves around whether the plaintiffs have established standing to challenge the minimum coverage provision in the act as well as whether the minimum coverage provision can be “severed” from the rest of the ACA.

Some Republican-governed states have attacked the law’s individual insurance mandate as unconstitutional, and thus they want the Supreme Court to repeal the entire law. As law.com reported in July, “The Trump administration’s U.S. Justice Department argues in the health care case California v. Texas that the entire health care insurance law should fall after Congress in 2017 eliminated the tax penalty for failure to purchase health insurance. The penalty provision could not be severed from the rest of the act because of its interrelationship to other critical features of the law, then-U.S. Solicitor General Noel Francisco said in a recent brief.”