Supreme Court Decision Marks a Failed Attempt at Attacking ACA: Jeffrey Fitzgerald, JD

Jeffrey Fitzgerald, JD, stakeholder and health care lawyer at Polsinelli Law Firm, discussed the consequences of the Kennedy v Braidwood decision, which allowed for Medicaid to continue covering preventive services. The case, he said, marked another failed attack against the Affordable Care Act (ACA).

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity; captions are auto-generated.

Transcript

How important is the Braidwood decision to the protection of both preventive care and the ACA?

This case goes down as 1 more attempted but failed challenge to the [Affordable] Care Act. As you know, there have been a number of legal challenges to the [Affordable] Care Act since its inception, and, for the most part, most of them, with 1 small exception, have failed. And so I put this in the category of 1 more failed attempt to challenge part of the [Affordable] Care Act.

The key takeaway for people today is that it preserves the structure of preventative services under the [Affordable] Care Act. What was working the last 10 years will continue to be, unless Congress tweaks it, what's going to happen the next 10 years. In that way, nothing really changes. In my view, it was working before, [and] it's going to keep on doing what it was doing. And in that way, it kind of preserves the concept and the structure and where we are today on preventative services covered by health plans.

I think it does kind of remind people that challenging statutes [is] harder than it might seem to a layperson observer, right? And here, I think the quality of the government's arguments came through, even if they kind of pivoted over time. It's one of those things where this is probably closer to a near-death experience than something major happening different in the future. We could have turned to taking a sharp turn, but we didn't. To the layperson, maybe it's one of those kind of things where you're like, "Okay, it happened, but since nothing really changed, we all forget about it in 3 years."