Trump asks Supreme Court to scrap Obamacare in middle of pandemic

White House backs legal bid to overturn Affordable Care Act despite 27 million Americans losing jobs-based health insurance during Covid-19

The Trump administration has told the Supreme Court to invalidate the Affordable Care Act (ACA) that has provided more than 20 million Americans with health insurance amid the Covid-19 pandemic.

The administration submitted the 82-page document late on Thursday arguing that the ACA was unconstitutional after Congress, then under Republican control, eliminated tax penalties for not purchasing health insurance in 2017.

Joel White, a Republican strategist, told The New York Times that he considered it “pretty dumb to be talking about how we need to repeal Obamacare in the middle of a pandemic”.

An estimated 27 million Americans have lost their health insurance amid mass unemployment since March, while some 487,000 have signed up with HealthCare.gov since the pandemic started, which acts as a back-up.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called the Trump administration’s decision an act of “cruelty” on Thursday.

“President Trump and the Republicans’ campaign to rip away the protections and benefits of the Affordable Care Act in the middle of the coronavirus crisis is an act of unfathomable cruelty,” she said in a statement.

Solicitor general Noel Francisco said on Thursday that once the law’s health insurance mandate was invalidated along with two other provisions, “the remainder of the ACA should not be allowed to remain in effect”.

“Nothing the 2017 Congress did demonstrates it would have intended the rest of the ACA to continue to operate in the absence of these three integral provisions,” said the document. “The entire ACA thus must fall with the individual mandate.”

The legal challenge means that US president Donald Trump – who failed to repeal the law in 2017 – will throw his weight behind Republicans in Texas and 17 states who want to see the ACA, otherwise known as Obamacare, invalidated.

The Trump administration and Republican lawmakers have maintained that their aim was to “repeal and replace” the health care act, despite showing no alternative plan.

Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, said hours earlier that “every American deserves the peace of mind that comes [with] access to affordable, high-quality health care”.

Mr Biden, who was vice president when former president Barack Obama signed the ACA into law in 2010, says he would protect and build-on Obamacare if he wins November’s election.