Supreme Court Upholds Obama Health Care Subsidies[W:700]

Thank God the failure that is Obamacare can continue and die slowly instead of being cut down by the SCOTUS. A great day indeed!

Erod said:

Why is Scalia the only one who can read English?

This destroys the middle class, who are being raped by these sky high deductibles.

Concierge plan for those that can afford it. No coverage for most everyone else.

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First, they voted with the government and the insurance companies over the people to force us to purchase their product. Can you imagine if the government said we all had to buy a new car every year from GM?

And now this. Oh, it only says "states" and not the federal government? No problem, will just add it in. Talk about legislating from the bench. What a disaster this court is.

Does this set a precedent that the high court now needs to interview the lead sponsors of legislation to determine intent when reviewing ambiguity in law.

Can anyone now ask for clarification of amendments to the Constitution?

Threegoofs said:

Looks like the Red States dodged the bullet.

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Too bad thed rest of the Nation didn't.

Oh well, we get to look forward to Democrat candidates completely avoiding the issue of ObamaCare


And more elections like 2014

MrT said:

This is really good stuff. Glad that we don't have to re-legislate the entire healthcare law and now we can focus on using the tools it provides to supply better healthcare for cheaper.

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Cheaper for who? Cheaper how? Both premiums and deductibles have significantly increased.

upsideguy said:

Maybe the Cons will finally stop trying to rely on legislation from the bench. Perhaps they will get smart and actually work WITH the PPACA (fix the legislation, where appropriate and expand state exchanges), because they are out of options in working against it.

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Conservatives didn't draft a piss poor bill, so poorly written that it needs to go to SCOTUS to be interpreted.

CanadaJohn said:

That's pretty funny, actually. The truth is the "Cons" have to stop relying on the courts NOT legislating from the bench. Justice Roberts has proven that he'd much rather be President than Chief Justice. He'd much rather create legislation than simply determine its constitutionality. His two rulings in relation to the ACA are a complete abandonment of his oath of office and "Cons" in the future would be well served not to rely on the Chief Justice's integrity because it doesn't exist.

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Say what you will about his decisions, but he is a human being and he didn't want the legacy of his court to be the one that shot down Obamacare for millions of people. I think any Chief Justice would feel and rule the same way.

ocean515 said:

Actually, I hope Republicans continue to ignore the problems liberal/progressives created in their unilateral PPACA boondoggle. Much better to say, "don't ask us, talk to the Democrats who created it."

The Nation deserves to see how Democrats do things.

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But it's the GOP with control of the House and Senate. It's their obligation to govern and fix the law if they see problems, not point fingers.

cpwill said:

With today’s Obamacare decision, John Roberts confirms that he has completely jettisoned all pretense of textualism. He is a results-oriented judge, period, ruling on big cases based on what he thinks the policy result should be or what the political stakes are for the court itself.

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I didn't realize that was basically the entire article. Typical drivel from NRO. Anyone intellectually honest recognizes that at the very least the competing sides both had compelling legal precedent to point to, which of course rules out hacks at NRO....

pbrauer said:

Say what you will about his decisions, but he is a human being and he didn't want the legacy of his court to be the one that shot down Obamacare for millions of people. I think any Chief Justice would feel and rule the same way.

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You're much more ideologically equipped to be the bleeding heart supporter of the poor, hard done by Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court. It is not the job of a Supreme Court Justice, and certainly not the job of the Chief Justice of the court, to play politics with the law. There are many issues that come before a court that are contentious and often that even a majority of the public support or oppose. Are you suggesting that the Supreme Court should rule via public opinion polling?

Chief Justice Roberts has been a disgrace, in my view, in that he has in effect practiced the equivalent of jury nullification. He has taken his position and substituted his own personal viewpoint on the validity of law for an actual interpretation of the law as written.

OrphanSlug said:

Too many threads on this, but this is more or less my post for the other one...

The dissenting opinion is right, this decision is a gross misinterpretation of the actual ACA language. Some seven times in ACA is specifies subsidies and tax credits though "Exchange established by the State." The majority in this 6-3 decision just decided that the Secretary of Health and Human Services, and by extension, the Department of Health and Human Services equates to a State. The argument can now be made that by precedence on what is equal to a State. If a law references a State, the Federal government can now argue any relevant department is now capable of being involved in that definition.

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But the problem is the ACA itself contemplated that states would not establish their own exchanges, and provided that in those cases the Feds would do so on their behalf. It's a stretch at best that the law intended for the Feds to establish exchanges that WOULD FAIL, and that didn't qualify for the central feature of the ACA which was subsidies for lower income individuals.

And it's more of a stretch that this feature - failure of the subsidy in states with Fed exchanges - was so well hidden that it took months and some eagle eyed citizen to catch. None of the states knew it when they decided whether or not to establish exchanges. If the Congress intended such a draconian result to attach to the decision to let the Feds operate the exchange, a plausible interpretation is that they would have clearly outlined such a result instead of hinging it on splitting hairs between "by a state" versus "by the Feds on behalf of the state". That they did not is strong evidence that the subsidy failure for those states was a drafting error and not an intended result. And when faced with the failure of a law based on a drafting error the SC is required to read the law and its intent as a whole and sustain the law.

OrphanSlug said:

Too many threads on this, but this is more or less my post for the other one...

The dissenting opinion is right, this decision is a gross misinterpretation of the actual ACA language. Some seven times in ACA is specifies subsidies and tax credits though "Exchange established by the State." The majority in this 6-3 decision just decided that the Secretary of Health and Human Services, and by extension, the Department of Health and Human Services equates to a State. The argument can now be made that by precedence on what is equal to a State. If a law references a State, the Federal government can now argue any relevant department is now capable of being involved in that definition.

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Everyone that was in congress that has spoken on the matter has insisted that the intent of the law was that subsidies would also apply to the federal exchange. That makes a huge difference between this and some instance where someone just wanted to change the definition of what a "state" is.

JasperL said:

But it's the GOP with control of the House and Senate. It's their obligation to govern and fix the law if they see problems, not point fingers.

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It's their obligation to work on legislation as they see fit. I prefer Republicans not clean up the mess Democrats made. It's their plan, they passed it without a single Republican vote, in the dead of night, during the Holidays. Let them clean up their mess. If people are unsatisfied, let them remember who was responsible.

Seems very fair to me.

JasperL said:

But the problem is the ACA itself contemplated that states would not establish their own exchanges, and provided that in those cases the Feds would do so on their behalf. It's a stretch at best that the law intended for the Feds to establish exchanges that WOULD FAIL, and that didn't qualify for the central feature of the ACA which was subsidies for lower income individuals.

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Then the remedy is legislative change.

The ultimate point of the Supreme Court is to decide on the merit of a challenge based the case made vs. the wording of the law in question and that case made. It is not the purpose of the Supreme Court to determine what should happen when the government *thinks* something should have happened according to legislative plan, but did not for whatever reason.

ACA as written is very explicit in what tax credits and subsidies are to be applied to, and in seven separate parts of ACA it explicitly says "Exchange established by the State." What ACA does *not* say about tax credits and subsidies is an exchange established by the State or the Secretary of Health and Human Services.

The dissenting opinion is right, the Federal argument should have failed forcing Congressional remedy for the mistake made.

JasperL said:

But it's the GOP with control of the House and Senate. It's their obligation to govern and fix the law if they see problems, not point fingers.

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Didn't realize they had a veto proof majority.

Regardless of one's views on the Affordable Care Act, the Supreme Court’s majority decision appears to be the correct reading of Congress’ intent when adopting the law. The following excerpts of the Court’s decision are particularly relevant:

And by using the words “such Exchange,” the Act indicates that State and Federal Exchanges should be the same. But State and Federal Exchanges would differ in a fundamental way if tax credits were available only on State Exchanges—one type of Exchange would help make insurance more affordable by providing billions of dollars to the States’ citizens; the other type of Exchange would not.

http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/14pdf/14-114_qol1.pdf

Had Congress intended any other approach, the legislation would in effect have been largely self-defeating. In other words, the Congress would have created a massive escape clause by which the status quo could be preserved, even as Congress intended to change the status quo.

It’s difficult to imagine that Congress would have expended all its effort on a highly-contentious matter to then allow others to easily render its efforts irrelevant. At worse, one would be dealing with a technical error, not the intent of Congress. Essentially only political cynics who believe the government has become near-totally dysfunctional could believe that Congress would have deliberately taken on a difficult issue, readily assumed the costs of doing so, all the while intending to make its law structurally irrelevant.

Put another way, does Congress intend to pass laws merely for the sake of illusion but no desire that they take effect? That's what a contrary decision would have required. It is no surprise that a 6-3 majority chose to uphold the law.

This does not mean that the Supreme Court endorsed the merits of the law, much less the impact of an adverse ruling's outcome. Instead, assuming Congress is rational, it concluded that Congress' original intent was that states could take the lead on creating exchanges, but in the absence of such leadership, the federal government could create such exchanges. All exchanges would enjoy the same tax treatment.

Of course, I will note that I could be wrong. But that's how I see it.

Μολὼν λαβέ;1064753238 said:

Cheaper for who? Cheaper how? Both premiums and deductibles have significantly increased.

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I just heard a little bit of Obama speaking. One thing he mentioned was keeping premiums down. I just wonder how anyone on the left swallows that one, and still claims to have integrity. He will keep lying as long as they keep supporting it.

roughdraft274 said:

Everyone that was in congress that has spoken on the matter has insisted that the intent of the law was that subsidies would also apply to the federal exchange. That makes a huge difference between this and some instance where someone just wanted to change the definition of what a "state" is.

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What matters is the language of the law, and in drafting ACA they all failed to take their "floor time" speaking and apply it to the actual language used. The government should have lost the case forcing the remedy to be in Congress, which is how this is supposed to work. The Supreme Court is not supposed to be crafting the law for where Congress failed.

Logicman said:

Well, enjoy your sky-high premiums and $5K and $10K deductibles

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Erod said:

This destroys the middle class, who are being raped by these sky high deductibles.

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Μολὼν λαβέ;1064753238 said:

Cheaper for who? Cheaper how? Both premiums and deductibles have significantly increased.

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Any evidence to back that up? Has the rate of increase slowed over the past few years?

I gotta laugh at the response from reactionaries in this thread. They're all over the lot. "It's great news! Now the Democrats will be forced to continue defending the Act." "What a disaster for the country!" Just what I'd expect from people who can't think things through clearly.

The legislation will continue to gain in popularity, and for good reason. A win for Democrats and democracy.

ocean515 said:

It's their obligation to work on legislation as they see fit. I prefer Republicans not clean up the mess Democrats made. It's their plan, they passed it without a single Republican vote, in the dead of night, during the Holidays. Let them clean up their mess. If people are unsatisfied, let them remember who was responsible.

Seems very fair to me.

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Yes and very appropriate considering that Republicans have shown no concern for the public good in at least 7 years. Why should they start now?

US Conservative said:

Conservatives didn't draft a piss poor bill, so poorly written that it needs to go to SCOTUS to be interpreted.

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The problem I have with all of this is that it is not something that was written years and years ago, it is a new piece of legislation and they could have written "federal" in there just as easily as the wrote "state". They didn't.
Words don't matter anymore? Thanks, SCOTUS, you suck.

iguanaman said:

Yes and very appropriate considering that Republicans have shown no concern for the public good in at least 7 years. Why should they start now?

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That's the problem, they have shown concern but Obama's threatened to veto anything to do with Obamacare. Hell, while insane Harry was still running the Senate any bills that showed concern were shelved and never even brought to the floor. But don't let me derail your ideologue-ing... please continue about how Republicans are all evil...

iguanaman said:

Yes and very appropriate considering that Republicans have shown no concern for the public good in at least 7 years. Why should they start now?

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Yes, I am sure they are aware that everything is their fault. I'm sure they shouldn't expect any other sentiment from liberal/progressives. Liberal/Progressives put out a mess called Obamacare, and it's the Republicans fault.

Dang, I wonder if I'll live long enough to see a liberal/progressive take responsibility for anything.

Μολὼν λαβέ;1064753238 said:

Cheaper for who? Cheaper how? Both premiums and deductibles have significantly increased.

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Healthcare spending increased at the lowest pace in 2014 in nearly 40 years. Do I expect premiums and deductibles to increase? Absolutely - they will probably increase at a rate slightly higher than the rate of inflation (same as has been occurring for 40 years) and it is likely that they will increase by a faster rate over the next year or two while insurance companies get adjusted to the new population of individuals requiring health care.

With that said, the law allows for unprecedented transparency (if an insurance company wishes to increase its premiums, it must first make a request to the government with its proposed increases and await approval) and competition (you now have a central location where you can easily compare and contrast the numerous insurance plans for your area and the number of insurance plans has gone up since the introduction of the ACA, not down).

CanadaJohn said:

You're much more ideologically equipped to be the bleeding heart supporter of the poor, hard done by Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court. It is not the job of a Supreme Court Justice, and certainly not the job of the Chief Justice of the court, to play politics with the law. There are many issues that come before a court that are contentious and often that even a majority of the public support or oppose. Are you suggesting that the Supreme Court should rule via public opinion polling?

Chief Justice Roberts has been a disgrace, in my view, in that he has in effect practiced the equivalent of jury nullification. He has taken his position and substituted his own personal viewpoint on the validity of law for an actual interpretation of the law as written.

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No, I not saying that at all. All rulings are not the same. Bringing down Obamacare would be especially messy as it would be the cause of many deaths of many people who depend upon Obamacare.