The Supreme Court Will Hear Obamacare Case Exactly One Week After the Election

At Trump’s urging, the court could invalidate the entire health care law.

Albin Lohr-Jones/Pacific Press/Zuma

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The Supreme Court will hear Texas v. United States, the case that threatens to undo Obamacare and leave 23 million Americans uninsured, on November 10—exactly one week after the presidential election.

The lawsuit, brought by Republican attorneys general, argues that the lack of a financial penalty tied to the  individual mandate, which the GOP’s 2017 tax bill set to zero, invalidates the entirety of the Affordable Care Act. The Trump administration has helped boost the lawsuit, which, beyond ending the insurance mandate, could erase popular consumer protections such as bans on insurers discriminating against people with preexisting conditions or the ability for children to remain on their parents’ insurance until they turn 26.

Democrats have been pushing for the case to be heard before November 3 to keep the president’s opposition to the ACA in voters’ minds on Election Day. The decision to hold oral arguments for the case a week later could dampen how much it would influence Americans’ choices at the polls (though no matter when the court scheduled the hearing, any ruling was unlikely until after the next presidential inauguration).

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In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

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