The court said that the challengers, a group called the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, had no right to be in court at all since neither the organization nor its members could show they had suffered any concrete injury.
The decision threw out the challenge to the law, on grounds that Texas and other objecting GOP-dominated states were not required to pay anything under the mandate provision. The vote was 7 to 2.
There would be enormous consequences were the court to throw out the ACA, which has survived twice in the high court. But the court’s makeup is very different now than on those past occasions.
The justices seemed sympathetic to $12 billion in insurance firms’ claims. The Affordable Care Act promised to partially reimburse insurers if they lost money due to peoples’ preexisting conditions.
The Supreme Court hears argument on Tuesday in a case in which insurance companies are suing the Trump administration over the removal of a subsidy they were paid to cover high-risk individuals.