Follow the links here if it’s new to you. It was a Category Five ObamaCare tornado in July when a three-judge panel on the D.C. Circuit agreed with conservatives and ruled that the text of the O-Care statute does not allow subsidies for people who bought their policies on the federal exchange, i.e. Healthcare.gov. Only if you bought your policy through an exchange created by a state are you eligible for help from Uncle Sam. That ruling is a nuclear bomb for the White House, obviously, because it would mean that the vast majority of new enrollees in O-Care would suddenly be on the hook for the full cost of their premiums. That would prove too expensive for many of those people, which would mean lots of dropped coverage and total chaos in the insurance industry. The D.C. Circuit ruling was huge, especially since the Fourth Circuit ruled the opposite way in a similar case decided the very same day as Halbig. That meant a circuit split. And the Supremes almost always take appeals where there’s a circuit split in order to resolve the dispute and set one uniform interpretation for all federal courts.But then, six weeks later, the Halbig ruling went out the window. The full D.C. Circuit decided to rehear the case en banc . . .
The possibility of the SCOTUS ruling the same way the three-judge panel did does present a bit of peril for state-level Pubs:
The silver lining here for ObamaCare supporters, of course, is that this could end up being a giant sh*t sandwich for the new GOP Congress and, more importantly, America’s new Republican governors and state legislatures. If Roberts sides with conservatives and finds that the law, as written, says federal consumers aren’t eligible for subsidies then the pressure on Congress to re-write that part of that law so that they are eligible will be intense. Boehner and McConnell will dry-heave over the electoral implications of it in 2016, but they’ll resist because they know their base would revolt if they rescued O-Care by rewriting that law. So the pressure will shift to the states to quickly build their own exchanges, whose consumers are eligible for subsidies. If you’re a Republican legislator or governor facing voters angry that they lost their subsidies because of the Supreme Court, what do you do then?
Now, if the whole damn thing could be repealed by, say, mid-February, all this would be moot.
Is your camp backing off of the replacement part of the equation or was that the more moderate arm that mistakenly promised that in the first place?
ReplyDeleteThere's a discussion within our ranks as to whether to start our with a wholesale repeal effort, or attack a few key features, such as the medical device tax, to begin with. That would affect how to proceed with one of the replacement proposals that Pubs have available.
ReplyDeleteWhen are you going after Medicare and what are you planning to do to it? Actually, I guess I could just google it.
ReplyDelete