U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) Alex Azar said on Thursday that a backup plan to replace the Affordable Care Act (ACA), or Obamacare, will not be proposed until after the Supreme Court rules on a pending lawsuit challenging the health care law.
Azar made his comments during a Senate Finance Committee hearing on the HHS budget request, drawing criticism from Democratic senators who expressed concern over the lack of an Obamacare replacement proposal when there is a real chance that the law could be struck down by the Supreme Court. In December, a circuit court ruled that a key tenet of Obamacare, known as the individual mandate, was unconstitutional. The court then sent the case back to a lower court to decide whether the individual mandate was severable from the rest of the ACA. If it isn’t severable then the entire ACA could possibly be invalidated.
