The court sidestepped the larger issue in the case, whether the 2010 health care law can stand without a provision that required most Americans to obtain insurance or pay a penalty.
The Affordable Care Act on Thursday survived a third major challenge as the Supreme Court, on a 7-to-2 vote, turned aside the latest effort by Republicans to kill the health care law.
The legislation, President Barack Obama’s defining domestic legacy, has been the subject of relentless Republican hostility. But attempts in Congress to repeal it failed, as did two earlier Supreme Court challenges, in 2012 and 2015. With the passing years, the law gained popularity and became woven into the fabric of the health care system.
On Thursday, in what Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. called, in dissent, “the third installment in our epic Affordable Care Act trilogy,” the Supreme Court again sustained the law. Its future now seems secure and its potency as a political issue for Republicans reduced.
The margin of victory was wider than in the earlier cases, with six members of the court joining Justice Stephen G. Breyer’s modest and technical majority opinion, one that said only that the 18 Republican-led states and two individuals who brought the case had not suffered the sort of direct injury that gave them standing to sue.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who had cast the decisive vote to save the law in 2012, was in the majority. So was Justice Clarence Thomas, who had dissented in the earlier decisions.
