Obamacare’s prognosis uncertain, but condition stable

The sky isn’t falling, but Congress sure isn’t doing anything to prop it up.

The Fort Worth federal judge’s ruling Friday striking down the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, does not mean people will be losing insurance or access to health care, contrary to overwrought reports.

For one thing, the ruling will be tied up in lengthy appeals, likely to end up on the U.S. Supreme Court’s calendar many months in the future. Nothing changes in the meantime.

As for extending insurance to people with preexisting conditions, there’s no going back on that; no politician is going to get anywhere suggesting that preexisting conditions no longer be covered. Even if Obamacare atrophies and dies, there will be a replacement that covers preexisting conditions — your health, and our elected leaders’ political survival, depends on it.

For another thing, the lengthy legal process still ahead will give Washington time to fashion a legislative solution to the mess it created.

Granted, that would be a medical miracle, given how woefully inert Congress is. It can’t secure the border or fund that security. It continues to watch unmoved as entitlement programs consume themselves and our financial future. And it can’t even get its most basic work done on time, lurching from budget crisis to budget crisis without an actual budget. One such manufactured crisis looms with a partial government shutdown possible on Friday.

But this is the bunch we’ve sent to do our bidding, heaven help us.

This newspaper supports the law, but opponents of Obamacare aren’t the heartless creatures they’ve been made out to be, and we respect that there are legitimate constitutional and legal arguments against it.

Still, it’s the law, it’s the system we have until completely overturned, it was more popular than the tax cuts in a Fox News poll last August, and it’s in everyone’s best interests to make it work. And if the ruling stands striking down the law, Republicans will have a special obligation to replace it.

We’ll let the courts sort out the legal challenges, including the judge’s view that last year’s elimination of the individual mandate and its penalty made the law somehow retroactively unconstitutional. But from the gallery, we wonder: Even if the entire law hinges on that individual mandate penalty — which the Supreme court considered a tax — is it really necessary to throw out the entire law? Could it not be argued that Obamacare’s taxing authority, which the high court has established, is still intact, and that Congress has simply reduced it to zero? Could Congress and a willing president not reenact the tax — thus proving that the authority underpinning the law is still there?

For now, take heart and fear not. Access to health care is unchanged. How we provide it and pay for it is the question.

The courts will do what they can with the snarled debris they’ve been handed. Meanwhile, it would help if Congress would pause the partisan sniping long enough to actually pitch in on a solution.

Democrats, you gave us this system. Republicans, you have a better one?