The more I think about it, the more disastrous this new ruling looks for the republican party. The optics of it are just terrible.
The ACA is far from perfect, but in broad outline the idea is popular. The majority of people want coverage for preexisting conditions, they want their kids to be covered until age 26, and they want some sort of gradational system that offers some sort of subsidized coverage to people who can't afford it. Particularly on this forum, we like to complain about broader problems with the US healthcare system that are mostly unrelated to the ACA, like cost overruns and billing discrepancies, but the ACA itself seems like a reasonable stab at mitigating the impacts of these problems, if not actually solving them.
The republicans have had full control of the US government for several years now, and instead of repealing the ACA they have made some changes to it. They removed the individual mandate and reduced funding for some of the cost-reduction measures, in an effort to drive up insurance costs. You can argue about whether they had good intentions here, but that's what they did regardless. So the ACA is at least in part a republican-molded law right now. They're the ones in control of it, and they're the ones who have given it its current form.
After some republicans in congress changed the ACA by removing the mandate, some other republicans from the state challenged the ACA on the basis of not having a mandate, and that looks like a terrible idea. They are trying to overturn the law they have molded, and success would mean millions of Americans would suddenly be without health insurance. They have no alternative replacement plan, so are they just trying to screw everyone? Where's the electoral advantage in that? Do they think they'll win in 2020 if a hundred million voters see their healthcare premiums double as a direct result of republican efforts to undermine US healthcare?
My suspicion is that this is just lack of discipline on their part. I suspect people like Mitch McConnell see the hazard here, which is why the republican congress was not involved in this lawsuit. The lawsuit came from republican state governors in places where the ACA is a blazing hot potato, where there is no danger of them losing elections as a result of harping on it. They've decided to go all-in locally on an issue that has proven to be a loser for republicans nationally. I suspect they're harming the party as a whole with this lawsuit, whether it is upheld or not.
If republicans genuinely want to improve the US healthcare system, I'm all for it. Propose a better plan, and then convince people to vote for it. So far, they don't actually have a better plan and they haven't been able to find the votes to just ditch the old one without something to replace it with. They only have a deep-seated hatred for a law nicknamed after a black democrat. Maybe the solution is to just rename the new republican-molded version to Trumpcare and let republicans adopt it as their own?