EDITORIAL: Address Obamacare through legislation, not litigation

March 31-- Mar. 31--In a courtroom in New Orleans, the Trump administration has taken up a long-shot legal challenge to strike down the "Obamacare" law entirely -- a decision that could severely reduce if not eliminate the health insurance coverage for hundreds of thousands of Louisiana families.

This reversal of administration policy -- it is very rare for the U.S. Justice Department to refuse to back standing law in courts -- rests on an unusually broad opinion from a district judge in Texas. The case is now before the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in the Crescent City.

We hope this challenge to the Obamacare law, the Affordable Care Act, will not be disruptive of existing arrangements, not least the expansion of Medicaid insurance cards to the working poor in our state and the majority of the others.

The District Court ruling at issue was that the Obamacare law is now unconstitutional because Congress repealed one key part of it, fines on people who remain uninsured. In fact, those fines were unpopular, but the law allowed many exceptions. That was the most minor of the big issues in the sprawling Affordable Care Act.

But leading Republicans in Congress said they did not intend to repeal other parts of the law when they cut out its fines. The Trump administration itself argued in the Texas court that only one part of the law was constitutionally questionable. Now, in a reversal, they want to strike down the whole law.

We did not endorse the vast overhaul of health care in the nation in 2010, in part because we anticipated there would be many unintended consequences. Still, after almost a decade, the law -- with changes over the years -- has become a part of the health care landscape in the nation.

Destabilizing such a large part of the economy through a highly debatable opinion from a single district court ruling, as the administration wants the 5th Circuit to do, would be damaging to many interests.

Further, the GOP majorities in the House and Senate last term failed to offer a coherent alternative to Obamacare. Democrats ran on saving Obamacare in their successful bid to take over the House.

Louisiana is one of the states with a Republican attorney general joining in the Texas lawsuit. This seems particularly insensitive to the plight of hundreds of thousands of Louisiana families now getting Medicaid insurance coverage.

We are not a rich state, and individual insurance markets were completely out of financial reach for most middle-class families, much less the working poor now covered by Medicaid.

If there is to be such a dramatic shift in health care, it should be made legislatively through the Congress, where consequences can be assessed and effective provisions for insurance coverage can be made part of any new law.

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