Rampell: Republican reassurances after ACA ruling ring hollow

Coming from Republicans, this is truly a bizarre message.

For a decade, they decried the intolerable “uncertainty” that Obama-era policies created for businesses. How could entrepreneurs decide how much to invest, and where, and under what terms, they asked, if the rules of the road were in flux?

Yet Republicans’ relentless attempts to undermine the ACA only escalate this anxiety-inducing uncertainty. Not just for businesses, but for millions of American families, too.

‘Planning and scheming’

I first spoke to Tomasic last year, when Congress was trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act legislatively. Like others among the 60 percent of Americans whose households include someone with a pre-existing condition, she found this prospect terrifying.

Her younger son, Alec, is something of a prodigy. At 15, he was accepted to the University of California at Berkeley, where he’s now a junior studying physics. But arranging these educational feats has been complicated. Alec has a disorder called mastocytosis, which periodically sends his body into shock and lands him in the hospital.

For years, Alec’s older brother, Nelson, helped care for him. When Alec was accepted to Berkeley, though, his mother decided it was time to let Nelson live his own life. She quit her full-time job in San Diego and moved with Alec to Berkeley, which gave her a flexible, part-time position.

Depending on her hours, that job doesn’t reliably come with benefits. She decided to make the move anyway because she could purchase subsidized Obamacare insurance, which next year will cost about $400 per month.

When Congress tried to repeal Obamacare last year, she fretted. When repeal failed, she breathed a huge sigh of relief. Then came this latest lawsuit from the attorneys general and governors of 20 red states.

Using a legal argument that’s been deemed ridiculous by even conservative legal scholars, these states persuaded a Texas judge to strike down the individual mandate, and with it, the entire ACA — its protections for those with pre-existing conditions, its Medicaid expansion, its income-based subsidies, everything.

Tomasic’s ability to buy insurance on the individual market could disappear if the ruling stands. She’s not the only member of her household at risk of losing insurance. Alec gets coverage through his father’s plan, which the ACA allows him to keep until age 26; if the law goes away, that plan could boot him as early as age 19. Perhaps he could then enroll in a plan through school. But not all such plans cover the $2,000 shot he gets each month to stabilize his condition.

“All this planning and scheming we have to do, it’s really appalling,” Tomasic says. “Especially in a country as rich as ours.”

Her family’s health and financial security was sewn together with a few fragile threads. Republicans threaten to unravel all of them.