Obamacare is here to stay?

SIX YEARS AGO, Lisa Longo of Phoenixville lobbied as an activist for President Obama's Affordable Care Act, known popularly as "Obamacare."

Today, the 50-year-old single mom, who works as an independent management consultant, depends on it. Without the $200-a-month subsidy she receives on the health insurance she buys through the government's marketplace, her 19-year-old daughter would lose access to doctors she's seen for the last decade, and maybe get less care.

So Longo was more than a little thrilled yesterday morning at the first news flash that the U.S. Supreme Court had voted 6-3 to reject the latest - and possibly the last, according to some pundits - conservative legal effort to unravel the sweeping government health program.

"I really felt a sense of relief that I wouldn't have to change my insurance and maybe change all my doctors," Longo said.

The Chester County woman was hardly alone in that relief. Officials say that if the high court had ruled differently on the disputed language in the ACA, many of the estimated 7.5 million Americans who get subsidies on policies purchased through the federal market would become uninsured again.

Stories like Longo's are a reminder of the high human stakes in the court ruling on Obamacare - the president's signature piece of domestic legislation that, according to government statistics, has seen a whopping 16.5 million more Americans get insurance since it was enacted in 2010.

When coupled with a second key ruling yesterday - upholding a broad definition of the progressive 1968 Fair Housing Act that was passed in the wake of the Martin Luther King assassination - the court's bold, if divided, decisions also raised an intriguing political question:

Is the Roberts Court - long considered conservative and pro-business, thanks to past rulings that allowed big money into politics and gutted the Voting Rights Act - growing more liberal as it enters its middle age?

Indeed, many experts believe that the court will end its 2014-15 session next week with a ruling that would allow same-sex marriage in all 50 states - a left-turn signal that marks a possible detour, if not a change in route, for the nation's highest court.

"It could just be a blip, but there's reason to suspect a more lasting change," said Adam Winkler, constitutional scholar and UCLA law professor. "Statistics show that this term may be the most liberal since the Warren Court of the late 1960s."

Winkler noted in an email interview that over the past year the Supreme Court - with its solid bloc of four liberal justices occasionally joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Anthony Kennedy - has handed wins to progressives on housing discrimination, redistricting and campaign finance.

But along with same-sex marriage, no case was as highly anticipated as the challenge to Obamacare by conservative activists who said the bill's ambiguous wording doesn't allow the feds to subsidize health insurance that's not purchased through a state-created exchange. Most states - especially those with Republican governors or legislatures - did not set up exchanges.

From the start, legal experts did not think this challenge posed as great a threat to the ACA law as a 2012 lawsuit against personal-insurance mandates. In that case, Obamacare was saved when Roberts shocked political observers and voted with the liberal bloc.

This time, it was Roberts coming to the aid of Obamacare again, joined by Kennedy and the four Democratic appointees. "Congress passed the Affordable Care Act to improve health insurance markets, not to destroy them," wrote the chief justice in his majority opinion suggesting that the law's intent is clear even if the wording is muddy.

Not surprisingly, the three hardcore conservative justices - Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito - disagreed. In a scathing dissent, Scalia said the court, known to insiders by its acronym SCOTUS, had acted so aggressively to save the 2010 health-care law that it should now be known as "SCOTUS-care."

"Words no longer have meaning if an Exchange that is not established by a State is 'established by the State,' " Scalia wrote.

In the aftermath, most pundits said the only chance now for undoing Obamacare would be the election of a Republican president in 2016, and even by then the law may be too entrenched.

"The law is working and it's going to keep doing just that," said President Obama, signaling that the era of challenges to Obamacare should be past. "This is health care in America."

In Pennsylvania, officials said the ruling was fantastic news for an estimated 350,000 people who bought health insurance through the federal marketplace and who received subsidies.

The average federal subsidy of $227 per month for each policy in Pennsylvania is slightly higher than the national average, they added.

"The most important thing for Pennsylvanians is that if you have insurance, nothing changes," said Neil Deegan, Pennsylvania director of the pro-Obamacare group Get Covered America.

Indeed, shortly after the ruling, Gov. Wolf announced that Pennsylvania is abandoning efforts to create its own state exchange, which had been a fallback if the high court would have ruled in favor of the conservative plaintiffs.

In Philadelphia, thousands from the ranks of the previously uninsured or underinsured have benefited from the subsidies since the law came fully online last year.

One of them is Barbara Butler, 63, a West Philadelphia bus driver who switched jobs a couple of years ago and had been planning to go without health insurance until she qualified for Medicare - but then signed up for Obamacare instead.

Now Butler said she has an individual plan that - thanks to a federal tax credit - costs her only 76 cents a month, and gives her considerable peace of mind.

Butler said the idea that she again might have lost her insurance because of the legal tussle was "frightening," adding: "You never know when something might happen and you need it."

And Winkler, the UCLA law scholar, had even more good news for ACA consumers like Butler and Longo: Yesterday's decision was crafted to prevent future presidents from gutting the law by administrative fiat. "By holding that the law can only be read to allow subsidies," he explained, "a President Rubio or Bush couldn't read the law otherwise."

Health-care advocates weren't the only activists in a good mood.

Local officials and advocates said they were pleasantly surprised by the justices' 5-4 decision that affirmed the broadest possible interpretation of the 1968 federal housing law that promotes integration.

Under the ruling, advocates suing over discriminatory patterns by home-sellers, landlords, lenders and others still don't have to prove that bias was intentional.

"We're extremely pleased with the ruling," said Jim Berry, executive director of the Housing Equality Center of Pennsylvania, who said the high court upheld 45 years of legal precedents.

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