Gov. Rick "not my problem" Scott.
Gov. Rick "not my problem" Scott.
Most Republicans governors seem to be under the impression that it's just
not their problem if the Supreme Court decides to yank the subsidies their constituents are getting under Obamacare to buy health insurance.
For some Republican governors it was a shrug of indifference. They say the onus falls on President Barack Obama and Congress to figure out what to do if the Supreme Court invalidates Affordable Care Act subsidies in their states. And if Obamacare falls apart, well, they say, good riddance.
For others—among them potential 2016 contenders Scott Walker of Wisconsin and John Kasich of Ohio—it's a shrug of uncertainty. Wisconsin's own state health program for certain low-income people relies on the federal exchange, and Walker called for the feds to come up with at least a short-term fix. Kasich says he's working on contingency plans to protect people in his state, but he hasn’t said what that would look like, or how he'd pay for it. […]
For the most part, governors from affected states depicted themselves as spectators to the court drama. […]
Florida Gov. Rick Scott, a conservative Republican, said the potential of an abrupt stop to the subsidies is Washington's doing. It's not his job to find a solution.
"This is a federal program, it's a federal problem," he said at the American Action Forum on Friday.
Florida, by the way, led all other states using the federal exchange for Obamacare enrollments for 2015, with 1.6 million sign-ups. Nine out of ten of those enrollees qualifies for the subsidies. If Rick Scott—or any other Republican governor—thinks that Congress is actually going to do something to fix the mess the Supreme Court appears ready to hand them, they haven't been paying much attention to Congress lately. There's not going to be any federal bailout for them. Republican leadership has made it more than clear that
they will not fix the law to find a way for the millions of enrollments to be preserved.
The eyes of Republican voters around the country are looking to their governors and their legislatures for a fix, and that includes one of the plaintiffs in the King case that could kill subsidies. Brenda Levy went into this case on the misguided assumption the Virginia legislature would surely do something to keep people from losing their health insurance. She, along with those Republican governors who think they can just pass the buck back to the feds, could be in for a very rude awakening when the Supreme Court rules.
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