Maryland launches counterattack to save Obamacare

Maryland Attorney General Brian Frosh launched a counterattack Thursday to save Obamacare as a Texas federal judge contemplates killing it.

Frosh sued the federal government in a Greenbelt, Maryland, court seeking a declaratory judgment that the Affordable Care Act is constitutional and a court order barring the U.S. from taking any action inconsistent with that conclusion.

The Maryland suit lands one week after the Trump administration told Fort Worth federal judge Reed O’Connor it has no qualms about his striking down the act, only that doing so too quickly could unleash “chaos.” Twenty Republican-led states sued in Texas arguing the health care law became unconstitutional when Congress repealed the the tax penalty incurred for failing to comply with a requirement to obtain minimum qualifying coverage.

Obamacare is constitutional even without the tax penalty, Frosh argued in his lawsuit. Overturning the law “would throw millions off health insurance rolls by reversing Medicaid expansion, ending tax credits that help people,” and empower insurers to once again deny coverage based on pre-existing conditions, Frosh said in a statement announcing the filing.

Frosh sued U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the federal departments of Justice and Health and Human Services.

Texas and the other states claim that when Congress repealed the tax penalty last year, it eliminated the U.S. Supreme Court’s rationale for finding the ACA constitutional in 2012.

While California, 14 other states and the District of Columbia won permission to intervene in defense of the ACA in Fort Worth, the Trump administration sided with the states seeking to dismantle it, a factor acknowledged by Frosh in his statement.

The case is State of Maryland v. United States, U.S. District Court, District of Maryland (Greenbelt).

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