US Justice files for repeal of Obamacare

Trump's move enables Democrats to run on healthcare in 2020 elections

US President Donald Trump has ceded to Democrats a key issue for the 2020 election, one that helped them win last November's midterm elections and control of the House of Representatives: the Affordable Care Act, or ACA.

And to some Republicans, what the Trump administration did last week could threaten not only their own re-election, but control of the Senate and the White House.

On March 25, in a filing in a federal appeals court, the Justice Department argued that the law should be thrown out in its entirety, including provisions protecting millions of US citizens with pre-existing health conditions and allowing young adults to stay on their parents' healthcare plans.

If the court overturns the law, known as Obamacare, around 20 million US citizens could lose their health insurance coverage, according to an analysis by the Urban Institute, an economic and social policy think tank.

The legal move could help Trump rally his conservative base. But after suffering a beating over healthcare in the midterm elections for the House, many Republican congressional leaders had said that they planned to move away from their long-standing efforts to repeal Obamacare.

Now Trump wants his party to take on the issue for 2020.

"Let me tell you exactly what my message is: The Republican Party will soon be known as the party of healthcare," he told reporters on March 26. "You watch."

The Justice department's move and Trump's comments surprised and even stunned many Republicans.

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley from Iowa, whose panel has jurisdiction over healthcare, said he received no heads-up from Trump or the White House that the president would call for the GOP to become "the party of healthcare".

Trump's message received backing from one of his main supporters: "If there's a message to be learned from 2018 on policy, it's healthcare," Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina told reporters. "Let's become the party of healthcare."

But in the 2018 midterm elections, healthcare became the top issue and voters who considered it the most important issue voted Democratic by a three-to-one margin. A Quinnipiac University poll, released on March 26, found that 55 percent of US citizens supporting the improvement and not the replacement of Obamacare.

Other Republicans gave differing responses to the administration's new court filing and Trump's comments.

Maine Senator Susan Collins, a moderate Republican who has voted against multiple bills dismantling the ACA and will be up for re-election, said she was "very disappointed" in the Justice Department's legal position.

"There's some very important, good provisions of the ACA that have helped to expand health insurance for low-income Americans" and also "provide important consumer protections to virtually all of us, and I would not want to see those abandoned", she said.

Senate Majority Whip John Thune from South Dakota warned that healthcare reform hasn't worked for Republicans in the past: "It's historically probably not been a great issue for Republicans."

Thune did say the GOP could turn it around "if we're providing solutions that create lower premiums and copays and deductibles for people".

Neither the White House nor Republicans in Congress have a plan to replace the Obama-era law. The White House said it would produce one in coming months.

Abolishing Obamacare was a promise Trump made in his presidential campaign and he has long decried Republican failures to do so. He recently attacked the late Republican Senator John McCain for his pivotal role in quashing the most recent Republican effort.

Obamacare was passed nearly a decade ago and the number of people enrolled has continued to increase since Trump was elected.

Though the US Supreme Court has twice upheld major parts of the plan, if the White House is successful on the legal front, the fate of Obamacare could again rest in the high court, which has installed two conservative justices since it voted to uphold the landmark healthcare law in 2012.

Democrats immediately seized on the administration's court filing, calling it the latest attempt by Republicans to strip health insurance from US citizens. The next day, they unveiled plans in the House for further strengthening of the act.