ACA by the numbers: 10 m ↓ in uninsured Benchmark premiums ↑ 2% on avg 6.7 m in marketplaces 9.7 m ↑ in Medicaid 3.8 m in the Medicaid gap
— Larry Levitt (@larry_levitt) December 29, 2014
It’s working and will continue to work as long as the Supreme Court does not decide to gut long standing and useful precedent.
Earl
>>insert spit-take here<<
Baud
It’s because it’s working that the Supreme Court has to gut it.
Fred
The poors getting access to health care? That’s got to be uncontitutional.
JPL
The Supremes will simply say it’s a quick congressional fix, so not my problem. ACA as we know it, will be gone by June.
Has a study been done to see, if the states that have exchanges, are healthy enough to continue? It’s been reported that Kentucky isn’t.
Baud
@JPL:
Kentucky shouldn’t be affected. This lawsuit affects only those states that use the federal exchange.
wvng
@Baud: Quite a few states, including WV, actively partnered with the feds in instituting the ACA, and use the federal exchange so they didn’t have to build one. So the feds acted as their contractor. I wonder how that will shake out if the Supremes gut the law.
Omnes Omnibus
@Baud: @JPL: Do you really think the Court will gut basic rules of statutory interpretation? That’s what it would take to kill the federal subsidies.
low-tech cyclist
Nah, they wouldn’t do that. Because everybody knows that “activist judges” who “legislate from the bench” are all libruls.
Richard Mayhew
@Omnes Omnibus: At least four of them will… the question is Brocolli and Freedumb
Baud
@wvng:
Good question. I don’t know.
@Omnes Omnibus:
They don’t have to gut anything. They’ll just say a statute that is ambiguous is unambiguous.
JPL
@Omnes Omnibus: Scalia, Thomas and Alito will. The unknowns are Kennedy and Roberts. I actually think it is Kennedy that could save the bill because Roberts wants to get back into the good graces of the conservs.
also.. Kennedy has always sided with businesses and the health insurance industry likes the law. imo
Baud
@JPL:
I can see Roberts being swayed by the politics of this again. Real middle class people in GOP states are going to be directly affected in a tangible way, not to mention the insurance companies.
Omnes Omnibus
@Richard Mayhew: We know that at least four justices chose to grant cert. We don’t know their reasoning. In any case, I have serious doubts that Roberts, at least, is foolish enough to violate basic legal principles.
@Baud: But it is ambiguous. No one who can pass a bar exam can make a non-specious argument that it isn’t. Just saying.
@JPL:
Of course. And I doubt that both of them will go along with the three stooges.
Baud
@Omnes Omnibus:
Two DC Circuit judges gave it the old college try.
NCSteve
Gut useful precedent? Oh, how little faith you have in them. I am absolutely confident that they can write another one of their needle-threading “all our previous precedent doesn’t apply as long as the ni-CLANG is president” that is sufficiently narrow to be disregarded once the Divine Right of Republicans to Govern is once again restored. Roberts in particularly is the master of this kind of evil weasel-termite chimera opinion-writing.
Omnes Omnibus
@Baud: And they got smacked hard by the en banc decision.
Baud
@Omnes Omnibus:
They could have granted rehearing because of the conflict with the Fourth Circuit.
Anyway, I hope it’s an academic point limited to the three or four dissenters.
Omnes Omnibus
@Baud:
That is what I suspect. We will see though.
MomSense
@Omnes Omnibus:
Burnsie made an ominous comment the other day based on the amount of time they scheduled to hear the case.
Violet
@Omnes Omnibus: Good lord yes. The Wingnut judges don’t care about precedent. They want a scalp.
Omnes Omnibus
@Violet: It isn’t precedent that they would be going against; it is a basic principle of statutory interpretation. Can you get five who will do that?
Violet
@Omnes Omnibus: Like NCSteve said they’ll needle thread and make the ruling “this one specific case only” and get their scalp. The only way it won’t happen is if the healthcare lobbyists have an impact. It’s money for them.
Gene108
@Violet:
The wing-nut judges care about precedent. They care that the precedent they admire was gutted by cases in the 1930’s to 1970’s, allowing labor unions to exist, the minimum wage to be Constituional, segregation to be illegal, etc. and these cases established ghe existing framework of what lawyers consider established precedent, but the wing-nut judges want to go back to a pre-1930’s interpretation of the Constitution, so no precedent is safe.
burnspbesq
@Omnes Omnibus:
FWIW, petitioners filed their brief the other day (it was in my Tax Analysts news feed this morning; I haven’t checked to see if there is a link at SCOTUSBlog). I have about as much stomach for reading it as I had for reading the SSCI executive summary, but I’ll probably get around to it at some point.
burnspbesq
@Omnes Omnibus:
Wasn’t there a concurring opinion in the Fourth Circuit that said that the statutory language unambiguously authorizes the provision of subsidies to people who buy their insurance on an exchange that is operated by the Federal government on behalf of a state?
burnspbesq
Link to petitioners’ brief. Bring your own barf-bag.
https://cei.org/sites/default/files/KING%20v%20BURWELL%20-%20No.%2014-114%20-%20Petitioners%20Opening%20Brief%20of%20the%20Merits%20-%20December%2022%202014.pdf
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@burnspbesq: Given Roberts’s recent history, shouldn’t we expect that an off-hand remark in a footnote of one of his decisions will give him the nanometer-wide opening to drive his truck through to decide things however he wants, stare decisis be damned? I would hope the good guys have looked through his decisions to try to counter things like that…
I’m not confident that Roberts won’t find some way to throw out the baby with the bathwater, but we’ll see.
Cheers,
Scott.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@burnspbesq: I like how they use “in fact” to push their interpretation. My spider sense always tingles really strongly when I hear or read a Republican say those two words…
Cheers,
Scott.
(Who realizes people on his side do it as well.)
burnspbesq
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet:
Hell if I know. But the stakes, in terms of potential damage to the rule of law and the very usefulness of law as a set of organizing principles for society, are very high.
There are only two ways for petitioners to win this case. Either (1) as Omnes mentioned, the Court completely disregards what every lawyer understands to be the basic rules of statutory construction or (2) the Court throws away the entire Chevron doctrine and invents an entirely new set of rules for evaluating whether administrative rules are valid (which, by way of collateral damage, would pretty much make the entire Administrative Procedure Act a dead letter). If (1), the larger outcome is complete chaos across all areas of the law, as there will be no agreed set of meta-rules that we can refer to in order to figure out what statutory language means. If (2), who the hell knows what the new construct will look like or how it will work–but if you ask a tax lawyer about what fun it was to try and figure out how to challenge the validity of a regulation prior to the Mayo decision in 2011, when we had at least three conflicting tests and no way of predicting which test the Tax Court would apply in any particular case, we can give you a sense of how bad it might be.
I’m lucky enough to make too much money to qualify for subsidies, and I live in a state that has its own exchange, so I don’t directly have a dog in this fight. But I have to be able to tell clients what the law is and what it means, so that they can make business decisions about how to comply, and on that level this case scares the bejeebers out of me.
MomSense
@burnspbesq:
I’m insuring myself and my family in a non-exchange state with the benefit of subsidies and I didn’t know what to tell my kids when they asked me if they thought we would lose our health insurance.
I’m pissed that SCOTUS is even entertaining this turd. At what point will the right wing stop bullying people who are trying to do right by their families?
burnspbesq
@MomSense:
Not ever.
The migration to California if these selfish bastards get their way is going to make 1934-5 look like small change by comparison. Grapes of Wrath II, anyone?
MomSense
@burnspbesq:
I’ve considered moving to CA. I don’t see much of a future for my kids here in Maine except as a place to visit family.
Zinsky
Hizzoner Roberts is still not getting invited to all the muckity-muck dinner parties in DC since he found that the tax code permits social engineering like Romneycare, oh pardon me, Obamacare. So, the tiny-dicked smug asshole will fix that little turd in the conservatives collective cocktail by remanding this technical tax glitch to the troglodytes in the U.S. House, who are as likely to fix it as it is likely that pink and yellow winged monkeys will fly out of Clarence Thomas’ asshole.