WASHINGTON – U.S. Senators Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), member of the U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, on Friday released a statement following a ruling in the case Texas v. United States. The ruling by U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor throws out the 2010 Affordable Care Act in its entirety, throwing the American health care system into chaos in the midst of open enrollment. 

“This is a five alarm fire -- Republicans just blew up our health care system. The anti-health care zealots in the Republican Party are intentionally ripping health care away from the working poor, increasing costs on seniors, and making insurance harder to afford for people with preexisting conditions,” said Murphy. 

“Don’t be fooled, this rests one hundred percent on the shoulders of President Trump and Republicans in Congress who empower him. Trump took the extraordinary step of sending his lawyers to argue to end health coverage for 20 million people and he got his wish. Not a single Senate Republican challenged him, and now they own this disaster as much as he does,” Murphy added. 

This summer, Murphy warned of conservatives’ efforts to exploit the courts to dismantle protections for people with preexisting conditions. “The new priority for those that oppose the Affordable Care Act and the protections that are built in it for Americans who are sick or have ever been sick, the new strategy is to use the court system as a reason to try to invalidate the protections in the law for people with preexisting conditions, protections, by the way, that Republicans said that they supported during the debate over the Affordable Care Act. The case is currently before the district court level. It's Texas v. United States, and it has drawn interest because of an exceptional decision by the Trump administration. The Trump administration has decided to weigh in on behalf of the petitioners, abandoning the traditional role of the executive to defend a statute. Traditionally an executive will defend a statute regardless of whether they support it or not because who will support the statute if not the United States government. In this case the Trump administration is going to court to argue that the United States congress cannot, under the constitution, provide protection to people with preexisting condition against discrimination and rate increases are from insurance companies,” he said at the time. 

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