The Supreme Court is slated to hear arguments from a group of conservatives who think that the Affordable Care Act is violating their religious rights — by offering coverage for an extraordinarily effective HIV prevention medicine.
As SCOTUSblog reports, the highest court in the land is taking up the Becerra v. Braidwood Management case, named for Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra and the Texas-based corporation Braidwood Management, which is owned by Republican megadonor and alleged voter fraudster Steven Hoze.
Initially filed in 2020, this lawsuit against the federal government argues that the ACA's mandated coverage of HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PReP) drugs — and hundreds of other preventative services, including screenings for STIs and cancer, as well as the HPV vaccine — is unconstitutional.
PreP is extremely effective at preventing HIV infection. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, PReP drugs like Truvada Descovy can reduce the risk of getting HIV by 99 percent when taken correctly, which is a huge deal for anyone who remembers how people were dying in droves from AIDs just a few decades ago.
And specifically, many of those hundreds of thousands of deaths were gay men. That, plus some homophobia, is why Braidwood, Kelley Orthodontics, and a handful of individual Texans, have maintained for years now that the ACA's preventative care mandate "violates their religious beliefs by making them complicit in facilitating homosexual behavior, drug use, and sexual activity outside of marriage between one man and one woman."
As plaintiff Joel Miller said in 2023, he and his family do not "engage in the behaviors that makes [sic] preventive treatment necessary" because, as he put it, his wife is "past her childbearing years." (Which is itself a chilling peek into type of mind that would bring a case like this.)
Ironically enough, the first Trump Administration defended the ACA's no-cost preventative care requirements back in 2020, as CNN notes in its reporting of the case reaching the SCOTUS docket. It's unclear whether president-elect Donald Trump's new administration will do so — especially because one of the plaintiffs' lawyers, Gene Hamilton, runs a nonprofit alongside incoming deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller.
Beyond Hamilton, the plaintiffs in Braidwood v. Becerra have another heavyweight in their corner: former Texas solicitor general Jonathan Mitchell, the architect of the state's six-week abortion ban.
In 2022, a federal judge in Texas ruled partially in favor of the plaintiffs, striking down the clause that required businesses to cover the lawsuit's laundry list of preventative medicines and services for free. The next year, another conservative jurist in the Longhorn State doubled down on that ruling and issued a nationwide injunction against "any and all agency actions taken to implement or enforce the preventive care coverage requirements."
Last year, the Justice Department appealed the decision, which found that the decision made by lower courts "jeopardizes healthcare protections that have been in place for 14 years and that millions of Americans currently enjoy."
SCOTUS has not yet set a date for the hearing, which advocates say will not only harm queer Americans, but anyone seeking preventative care.
"It could harm so many people," Shelly Skeen, a senior attorney at the Dallas-based Lambda Legal nonprofit, told the LGBTQ website them. "I want folks to recognize that this is not limited to people who are LGBT. This could have more broad impacts on all of us."
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