After a lengthy lawsuit, U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor of the Texas Federal Court ruled that the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, violated the constitution.

Since Congress removed the penalty for the Individual Mandate, a law that required everyone who could afford healthcare to purchase it or pay a fine, Judge O’Connor ruled that “The Court finds the Individual Mandate ‘is essential to’ and inseverable from ‘the other provisions’ of the ACA.”

The lawsuit stated that since the Supreme Court declared that the mandate was considered a tax, now that the tax had no penalty, it can not be considered a tax anymore, and therefore is a violation of the Constitution. O’Connor confirmed this and wrote that the mandate, “can no longer be sustained as an exercise of Congress’s tax power.”

Due to that fact that the Individual Mandate was ruled unconstitutional, the entire ACA act was also invalidated, because the judge deemed the Individual Mandate an unseverable part of the act.

While it is currently unclear what is to happen now, President Donald Trump backed the ruling on Twitter, saying “Wow, but not surprisingly, ObamaCare was just ruled UNCONSTITUTIONAL by a highly respected judge in Texas. Great news for America!”

Wow, but not surprisingly, ObamaCare was just ruled UNCONSTITUTIONAL by a highly respected judge in Texas. Great news for America!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 15, 2018

As I predicted all along, Obamacare has been struck down as an UNCONSTITUTIONAL disaster! Now Congress must pass a STRONG law that provides GREAT healthcare and protects pre-existing conditions. Mitch and Nancy, get it done!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 15, 2018

Despite this loss, a group of states led by California is expected to appeal the ruling to the Fifth Court of Appeals.

If Obamacare is indeed repealed, it could leave millions of people uninsured, and would also mean that insurers wouldn’t need to cover patients with pre-existing conditions. While it is life-saving for some people, others have long contested the benefits of the act, citing increases in insurance premiums.

Many of the media outlets have portrayed the repeal as the end of the world. However, in reality, the repeal isn’t technically put in action yet. In the past, over 70 lawsuits have contested the integrity of Obamacare.ObamaCare has long been a controversial topic for many people. While many people rely on it to provide them with affordable healthcare and save their life, others see it as an extra burden.Many people are worried about how this ruling will affect them. For now, though, it won’t. This lawsuit will likely drag out for a very long time and maybe even end up in Supreme Court.What people need to know, though, is that even if ObamaCare is repealed, and Republicans try to find a way to create a new healthcare plan, they won’t be able to do anything they want, since the Democrats control the house. Under the constitution, both the House’s and the Senate’s agreement are required for a law to pass.One of the biggest thing that was in ObamaCare and will be repealed is the pre-existing conditions criteria. Under the current law, insurance providers must cover people who already have an existing condition. Covering existing conditions is not very attractive to insurers, because it requires them to pay part of the bill as soon as the plan starts.

If the pre-existing condition mandate is repealed along with the rest of ObamaCare, insurers may choose to not cover people with existing conditions. This means that some people won’t be able to pay hospital bills in full, and may cut out on treatment, which, in turn, can threaten their lives.

In the near future though, there is little need to worry about that.

The first thing we should make sure people understand is that there will be no immediate changes to their health care. We must remind people that government forcing us to buy a product or service is not only unconstitutional and unpopular, but striking down the individual mandate can help ameliorate the so-called affordable care act’s burden on Americans.

For example, most millennials cannot afford to buy a solid health care plan that is really worth the money, so they buy lower-costing ACA-compliant plans that really do nothing for you unless you get hit by a tractor and somehow survive.

Why not spend your hard-earned money in a way that actually protects your health? Chief Justice Roberts explained, like Democrats, that the individual mandate is what fuels the rest of the law. Many Republicans will want to see the individual mandate be struck down, and for congressional Republicans to develop a plan to protect our health care system.

Republicans want to see more free-market policies advanced and signed into law to help solve this perpetual problem. Additionally, I think that policies can be advanced to solve these problems in statehouses across the country. If you can solve some of these problems at the state level, we can move past the partisan gridlock in Washington D.C.

People tend to think in partisan terms, like single-payer or free-market health care, but what we should do is think rationally and reasonably to fix problems. Too often, things are not addressed until they are a crisis. And, when people think in a partisan way, rather than an evidence-based way, people’s lives are put in jeopardy.

When Colorado extremists sought to receive a waiver from Obama and pushed state-level single-payer health care in Colorado in 2016, ballot proposal Amendment 69 commonly called ColoradoCare, I spearheaded the coalition against the proposal. I sounded the alarm for months before it got on the ballot. While other Republicans wanted to talk about the price tag, which I fundamentally believe fails to work with the electorate, I made sure to let Coloradans know the proposal would have jeopardized access to reproductive health care and my organization ran ads featuring a woman that said we shouldn’t let politicians get in between women and their doctors, that ColoradoCare restricted choice.

After publicizing this concern, and applying pressure on the left-wing groups, Planned Parenthood, ProgressNow and NARAL came out against the proposal. So did top Democrats. What an interesting coalition it was, but there were so many concerns with this poorly-crafted, ideologically and morally bankrupt vanity proposal, that virtually everyone was forced to recognize that this proposal was the wrong approach to health care reform.

No party is immune to blind partisanship. I think in today’s era it is important to know when to crank up the heat on rhetoric and how to use tools to advance a mission, and it takes people working together and understanding differing approaches and values. Health care policy is literally a matter of life and death, and we need to take it seriously.