California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, a Democrat, said the state is prepared to ask for a review of the ruling.
“While the appellate court did not explode the ACA, it certainly laid in place the time bomb by sending it back to the district court to do just that,” he said in a call with reporters Thursday.
Trump, on the other hand, called the ruling “a win for all Americans” and vowed to “give the American people the best health-care in the world.”
But there’s “no sign” of a health-care plan that Republicans can coalesce around and warned that debating the ACA means playing on Democrats’ turf, Holtz-Eakin said, since the most unpopular part of the ACA that conservatives railed against — the individual mandate — has been eliminated.
“All of the things that were lightning rods on the right were gone,” Holtz-Eakin said. “All you can do now is say we don’t want to spend that money which means we don’t want to cover those people. That’s a tough place to be in.”
To counter that, GOP strategists prefer to keep the 2020 focus on more left-leaning plans like the proposal by Bernie Sanders to eliminate private insurance and put all Americans in Medicare, or Elizabeth Warren’s gradual transition to Medicare for all.
Republican Division?
Still, some top Republicans sought to distance themselves from the lawsuit. Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, chairman of the health-care committee, called the Justice Department’s argument that the ACA must be struck down “far-fetched.”
He said in a statement Wednesday that “I am not aware of a single senator who said they were voting to repeal Obamacare when they voted to eliminate the individual mandate penalty.”
The ruling “punts on the question of severability,” or whether the individual mandate can be separated from the rest of the law, according to Allison Hoffman, professor at University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School. There’s no end in sight for the case to decide the ACA’s fate, she added: “This is going to go on forever.”