The Supreme Court Just Voted to Uphold Obamacare

The justices dismissed a Republican lawsuit for lacking standing.

Graeme Sloan/Sipa USA/AP

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Obamacare is here to stay.

On Thursday, the Supreme Court ruled that the Republican attorneys general suing to overturn the Affordable Care Act lacked standing. It was a 7-2 ruling, with only Justices Neil Gorsuch and Samuel Alito dissenting. The ruling means the Affordable Care Act is upheld, preserving the landmark health care law and ensuring that millions of Americans will be able to keep their insurance plans.

The case had centered around a GOP argument that the effective lack of an individual mandate—the financial penalty for going without health insurance, which Trump’s 2017 tax cuts set to $0—invalidated the rest of the ACA. While legal experts have widely derided the argument that the individual mandate is inseverable from the rest of the legislation, health care advocates had feared that a Supreme Court with three Trump-appointed justices would strike down the law that the former president hoped to “end.” Instead, they dismissed the lawsuit without examining the merits.

The Supreme Court had voted to uphold major portions of the ACA twice before. In a 6-3 ruling in 2015, the Court agreed with the Obama administration that the law permitted the federal government to subsidize insurance premiums in every state. In a 5-4 ruling in 2012, it found that the individual mandate was constitutional because it could reasonably be considered a tax. That decision was thrown into confusion when a federal appeals court threw out the mandate in 2019. But, as the justices ultimately determined, the law still stands—and the 23 million people currently covered by ACA plans can breathe a sigh of relief.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

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.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. It's going to be a nail-biter, and we really need to see donations from this specific ask coming in strong if we're going to get there.

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