Pelosi Reacts to Supreme Court's Dismissal of GOP Challenge to Obamacare

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says she is "happy" after the Supreme Court dismissed a major challenge to the Obama era health care law on Thursday, turning aside an effort by Republican-led states to throw out the law that provides insurance coverage for millions of Americans.

"Today's Supreme Court decision is a landmark victory for Democrats who work to defend protections for people with preexisting conditions," said Pelosi Thursday on Capitol Hill.

"Every day we think how far will the court go on preexisting conditions against Republicans, relentless assault to dismantle preexisting conditions."

The justices, by a 7-2 vote, left the entire law intact in ruling that Texas, other GOP-led states and two individuals had no right to bring their lawsuit in federal court. The Biden administration says 31 million people have health insurance because of the law popularly known as “Obamacare.”

The law’s major provisions include protections for people with pre-existing health conditions, a range of no-cost preventive services and the expansion of the Medicaid program that insures lower-income people, including those who work in jobs that don’t pay much or provide health insurance.

Also left in place is the law’s now-toothless requirement that people have health insurance or pay a penalty. Congress rendered that provision irrelevant in 2017 when it reduced the penalty to zero.

The elimination of the penalty had become the hook that Texas and other Republican-led states, as well as the Trump administration, used to attack the entire law. They argued that without the mandate, a pillar of the law when it was passed in 2010, the rest of the law should fall, too.

And with a more conservative Supreme Court that includes three Trump appointees, opponents of Obamacare hoped a majority of the justices would finally kill off the law they have been fighting against for more than a decade.

But the third major attack on the law at the Supreme Court ended the way the first two did, with a majority of the court rebuffing efforts to gut the law or get rid of it altogether.

Pelosi also spoke about President Joe Biden's trip to Europe.

Biden had multilateral summits with fellow democracies - the Group of Seven wealthy nations and NATO,

The meetings were largely punctuated by sighs of relief from European leaders who had been rattled by President Donald Trump over four years.

Biden also met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Geneva on Wednesday before returning back to Washington.

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