Of the many lies Conservatives tell about the Affordable Care Act few have been more fiercely defended yet more easily disproven than the concept that Obamacare requires some sort of “Death Panels.” It's simply untrue, a fundamentally dishonest distortion of the fact that insureds trying to come to terms with a looming (or even eventual) end of life are now entitled to coverage to get professional medical consultation when deciding how to best approach these most desperate and difficult situations. It's easy to harumph “If I'm going to be a vegetable just pull the plug”. If you've never helped a loved one sift through the complexities of such a situation you can't appreciate how difficult, lonely, and fraught with sheer terror of making the wrong choice such a situation entails. The coverage of professional consultations for end of life issues represents yet another significant benefit of Obamacare.
The radical Conservatives of the Republican Party, however, refuse to be dissuaded by the lack of Death Panels—and so have created one.
The required panel consists of nine untouchable beaureaucrats, and as befits the upcoming Congress five are Republicans. Several of those have been in the employ of the wealthy elites who fund the Conservative Movement, and as such are already known to harbor considerable hostility to the revised regulatory framework which makes up the Affordable Care Act.
The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against the challengers in King, but the Supreme Court agreed to grant cert to those challengers anyhow, despite the absence of a Circuit Court split. If the five conservative Supreme Court justices are so inclined, they can void ACA subsidies for millions of beneficiaries, and cripple the insurance markets in about three dozen states.
Some of those beneficiaries will be the kinds of transplant recipients and other patients I wrote about three and a half years ago. Except today there are many more of them. Several of these patients explained the risk to their lives in an amicus brief, urging a different circuit court to reject the challenge to the subsidies, and thus to the viability of the insurance markets their lives depend on.
“Without insurance, Jennifer [Causor’s] treatments would be completely unaffordable. Her transplant cost nearly $280,000. She takes three anti-rejection drugs, one of which has a sticker price of $2,400 per month…. Should she become uninsured, Jennifer would face bankruptcy and even death.”
You can read the whole brief below. Conservatives are brimming with excitement over the Court's decision to hear the challenge. Should the five conservatives rule that the text of the law doesn’t provide for federal subsidies in states that didn’t set up their own exchanges, they’ll place the onus on Congress or state governments to address the consequences for constituents who lose their benefits. The contested text could be fixed with a comically simple technical corrections bill, which Democrats would happily support. If Republicans were to sit on their hands, or use the ensuing chaos as leverage to extract unrelated concessions, it will cost people their lives. That is a cardinal reality facing justices, and the people soliciting their conservative activism.
http://www.newrepublic.com/...
Is the corrupt, Conservative majority of SCOTUS inclined to throw away their last vestige of judicial respectability by endorsing the thin, ridiculously convoluted argument of Halbig v Burwell, which deliberately ignores huge amounts of evidence to insist ACA was designed to destroy itself? If so, are Congressional Republicans willing to obstruct an incredibly simple means of correcting a simple, one time error of language in the bill? The passage Halbig boosters hang their hats on is in conflict with virtually everything else which is known about the law and its history, and such minor drafting errors are constantly corrected by simple bills in Congress.
It's going to be fascinating to see how this plays out. Rarely does a a political party deliberately place itself at such extreme risk of being blamed for deliberately harming millions of people. As the majority both on the Supreme Court and in both houses of Congress, Republicans won't be able to lay that off on Democrats.