Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Jon Ossoff arrived at Liberty Plaza with a mandate to keep the Affordable Care Act alive, while the United States Supreme Court begins oral arguments regarding the merits of “Obamacare.”
Senators Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue support the lawsuit because they want their donors in the health insurance industry to be able to make as much money as possible with no obligation to the public interest, with no obligation to public health, and with no responsibility to provide coverage to people when we need it most in our lives,” said Ossoff.
Ossoff was joined by Carolyn Bourdeaux, winner of Georgia’s Seventh Congressional District Race as well as concerned citizens.
Jon Ossoff says the right to healthcare should not be a partisan issue as the U.S. Supreme Court hears arguments regarding the Affordable Care Act. The runoff election is underway in Georgia. | #Election2020 #TheAtlantaVoice #Obamacare pic.twitter.com/UIb2gDhCbB
— The Atlanta Voice (@theatlantavoice) November 10, 2020
“Healthcare really was one of the driving issues in the race for Georgia’s seventh district,” said Bourdeaux. It is an issue that is very personal to me. My father suffered from a prolonged illness for about 10 years. My mother took care of him and all of their discretionary income was enough paying for his prescription medications. But beyond that, I have heard story after story of people who really suffer with the healthcare system as it currently exists. We don’t need to be going backward in this fight. There are 120,000 people in the seventh congressional district without health insurance.”
The Affordable Care Act has survived the repealing of the individual mandate in 2017. In December of that year, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) predicted that repealing the mandate would disincentivize 13 million beneficiaries from participating in the individual health plan market by 2027 in exchange for a $328 billion reduction in the federal budget from 2018 to 2028.
United States Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts said simply that if President Donald J. Trump and Republicans wanted to kill the law, they could have done it.
“I think it’s hard for you to argue that Congress intended the entire act to fall if the mandate was struck down when the same Congress that lowered the penalty to zero did not even try to repeal the rest of the act,” Roberts told the attorney representing Texas, one of the states fighting the law.
