Excerpt: Last week's oral arguments suggested that Justice Antonin Scalia, at least, found this argument appealing. In what is destined to become the most famous exchange of the session, he asked Verrilli: "You really think Congress is just going to sit there while all of these disastrous consequences ensue?"
Verrilli replied: "This Congress, your honor?" (You can hear Verrilli's disbelief, and laughter it provoked among court spectators, in the audio of the oral arguments posted on the court website; the exchange with Scalia starts at the 55:35 mark.)
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Proposed GOP alternatives to Obamacare subsidies are bad medicine
Supporters of healthcare reform were breathing a little easier last week after oral arguments at the Supreme Court over the Affordable Care Act.
On the docket was King vs. Burwell, a lawsuit brought by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a Koch-backed libertarian organization. The lawsuit asserts that the 2010 law bars health insurance subsidies for residents of three dozen states that relied on the federal government to set up their individual health insurance exchanges rather than doing so themselves.
If the plaintiffs prevail, about 7.5 million residents of federal-exchange states would be at risk of losing their insurance because they depend on the tax subsidies to make their coverage affordable.
The government's lawyer, Solicitor Gen. Donald Verrilli, advised the court on Wednesday that it gets worse: Many would have to drop their coverage, leaving only the sickest residents in the insurance pool. That would raise the cost of insurance, driving even more people out and dooming the insurance markets in those states to "death spirals."
At oral argument, Justice Anthony Kennedy seemed disinclined to knock out the subsidies in those federal-exchange states. If he joins with the four liberal justices known to favor the government's position, the ACA will survive this latest — and possibly last — brush with judicial execution.
Yet even in the absence of a final decision, King vs. Burwell has opened a window into the politics of healthcare, circa 2015.
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Heritage-Uncertainty-Principle Excerpt: Episodes like this one have grown so familiar that they've lost all capacity to surprise. Conservative health-care-policy ideas reside in an uncertain state of quasi-existence. You can describe the policies in the abstract, sometimes even in detail, but any attempt to reproduce them in physical form will cause such proposals to disappear instantly. It's not so much an issue of hypocrisy as Klein frames it, as a deeper metaphysical question of whether conservative health-care policies actually exist.
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