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Report: Obama lawyer missed chance to defend key aspect of health law at Supreme Court
The Obama administration might have needlessly imperiled the healthcare law's fate by failing to explain a key provision before the Supreme Court last month, The Associated Press reports.
The biggest challenge to the law has to do with the mandate that everyone have insurance. Aggressive questioning by conservatives on the court indicated their strong reservations about requiring people to have high-quality insurance, the AP reports, but that's not exactly how the law works.
"If I understand the law, the policies that you're requiring people to purchase must contain provisions for maternity and newborn care, pediatric services and substance abuse treatment," Chief Justice John Roberts said during oral arguments. "It seems to me that you cannot say that everybody is going to need substance abuse treatment or pediatric services, and yet that is part of what you require them to purchase."
The plaintiffs made the same argument.
"A lot of the insurance that's being covered is for ordinary preventive care, ordinary office visits, and those are the kinds of things that one can predict," Paul Clement, the attorney for the 26 states suing over the law, said in court.
Health policy experts say Roberts and Clement are right, but only up to a point.
The law does so by creating four tiers of benefits — known as platinum, gold, silver and bronze plans — with different levels of deductibles, copays and coinsurance. Bronze plans — the cheapest option — are akin to catastrophic insurance coverage that comes with low monthly premiums but sticks people with high out-of-pocket expenses before their benefits kick in.
"I would definitely say that if you listen to the court proceedings, it would be easy to come away with the impression that the healthcare reform law was requiring people to buy Cadillac insurance, which is certainly not the case," the Kaiser Family Foundation's Larry Levitt told The Associated Press.
