Welcome to Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health,

where we bring evidence, experience, and perspective to make sense of today's leading health challenges.

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This is Josh Sharfstein.

Today we turn to a decision from a U.S. District Court in Texas striking down a provision of the Affordable Care Act.

Joe Palmore is a former assistant to the Solicitor General at the U.S. Department of Justice and current co-chair of the Appellate and Supreme Court practice group at the law firm Morrison Forster.

We talk about this case called Bradwood Management Inc. versus Bacera, including the potential

consequences for health and what comes next.

Let's listen.

Joe Palmore, welcome to public health on call.

It's great to have you to talk about this Affordable Care Act decision that just came out of a district court in Texas.

Very happy to be here. Before we jump to the details of this decision, could you help me set the

context? I know you've been working on Affordable Care Act litigation for a long time. I mean,

the law passed 13 years ago, and it's still in the courts.

There's been a lot of litigation about the Affordable Care Act over the years.

The first lawsuits were literally filed within minutes of President Obama signing it.

And there have been several that were frontal attacks on the entire statute and where the

plaintiffs were seeking to invalidate the entire statute.

In recent years, there have been other cases like this one that don't pose the same threat to the

overall statute, but attack various components of it. So this particular lawsuit, for example,

doesn't put at risk the ability for people to get health insurance

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