The U.S. Supreme Court has had blood on its hands before—every time it declines to hear a death penalty appeal, for example. But, with the
King v. Burwell case the court will hear this session, the court could be handing down a death sentence to thousands in just one decision. If the court rules that Congress intended for health insurance subsidies to go only to people in states that set up their own exchanges, as the plaintiffs argue, then they'll effectively be taking health insurance away from millions of people.
The primary point of creating affordable, universal access to health insurance was to promote health and ultimately to avoid preventable deaths. Take that away, and people will die. By the thousands.
In a brief to the Supreme Court, dozens of public health scholars, along with the American Public Health Association, detail the harm the Court would create by ruling for the challengers in King vs. Burwell. Most of their analysis is rooted in the basic point that stripping insurance away from eight million people would dramatically impede their access to the health system. But they also flesh out the corollary argument that an adverse ruling would have deadly consequences, and ballpark the number of avoidable deaths such a ruling would cause.
"Researchers found that, in the first four years of the [health care reform] law in Massachusetts, for every 830 adults gaining insurance coverage there was one fewer death per year," the brief reads. "Using the national estimate that 8.2 million people can be expected to lose health insurance in the absence of subsidies on the federal marketplace, this ratio equates to over 9,800 additional Americans dying each year. Although the specific policy context and population impacts of any policy cannot be directly extrapolated from one setting to another, the general magnitude and power of these findings from the Massachusetts study demonstrate that even when approached cautiously, these earlier findings carry enormous public health implications for withdrawing subsidies and coverage from millions of Americans."
Add those nearly 10,000 premature deaths to the
estimated 17,000 that will die from the court's previous Obamacare decision, to allow states to opt out of Medicaid expansion and we'll have the real Obamacare death panel.