The Supreme Court said Friday it will challenge a part of the Affordable Care Act that requires insurance companies to cover certain types of preventive care for free.
The law, President Barack Obama’s signature legislative achievement, survived three major encounters with the Court.
The new challenge is for a working group that decides which treatments are covered. It determined that insurers must pay for, among other things, cancer and diabetes screenings; statin medications to reduce the risk of heart disease and stroke; physiotherapy for the elderly to prevent falls; and eye ointment for newborns to prevent infections causing blindness.
The legal requirement for coverage for lung cancer screening alone saves more than 10,000 lives each year, according to the Biden administration. told the judges.
Several Texas residents and two Christian-affiliated small businesses that provide health insurance to their employees filed a lawsuit challenging the way the task force was appointed, saying it violated the Constitution. The plaintiffs objected to the task force’s decision to cover medications that prevent HIV infection in certain at-risk people, saying the medications “encourage and facilitate homosexual behavior.”
Judge Reed O’Connor of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas agreed: decision that the United States Preventive Services Task Force had not been properly appointed by Congress and therefore did not have the constitutional authority to decide which services a health insurer should cover.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans upheld the decision, finding that the task force had too much independence.
In its motion seeking reconsideration of that decision, the Biden administration said the appeals court’s “legal basis would cause immense practical harm.”
“Millions of Americans,” the petition adds, “rely on insurance coverage for preventive services without cost sharing. If allowed, the ruling below would call into question the legal obligation of insurance issuers and group health plans to cover the task force’s recommendations.
In their responsethe challengers agreed that the Supreme Court should hear the case. Their brief opposed certain forms of preventative care, including “a highly controversial declaration that requires private insurance to cover all FDA-approved contraceptive methods, including contraceptive methods that some consider abortifacients.”
