The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday handed the Obama administration another victory in its fight to keep Obamacare alive, allowing that the words “established by the state” regarding exchanges and subsidies means established by the state or the federal government.
The Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision, authored by Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote the opinion affirming Obamacare’s fees as taxes three years ago, said tax credits are available to those people who get coverage through the federally established exchange, as well as to those who get coverage through state exchanges.
The dispute engaged a multitude of Obamacare’s rules, regulations and definitions.
The four people who brought the case live in Virginia, where the state refused to set up an exchange, so the federal government stepped in. They did not want to purchase the coverage and read the literal words of the law to mean they would not get the subsidies.
That would have made their costs for health coverage more than eight percent of their incomes, exempting them from the law.
But the government argued the IRS was correct in redefining the law and allowing subsidies to those in federal exchanges, too, meaning the plaintiffs would have to buy the coverage.
A summary of Robert’s opinion said the meaning of the words “established by the state,” was ambiguous.
So it said in context, they must mean that customers of federal exchanges are included.
The problem focused on just four words out of the hundreds of pages of the Obamacare law.
Those are “established by the state.”
The reference is to the exchanges that Obamacare architects envisioned being set up by every state. Only the states didn’t cooperate, and so the federal government stepped in to set up its exchange.
While millions of health insurance policies were canceled with the overall implementation of the president’s signature law, at issue in this particular fight was coverage some estimated would involve about 6.4 million participants in dozens of states where officials did not adopt the Washington ideology and set up their own exchange.
In support of the claim that only “state” exchanges were intended to provide subsidies were the highly publicized comments from Jonathan Gruber, a self-confessed architect of the Obamacare law and a professor at MIT.
He repeatedly stated that the law was written specifically to exclude benefits for people living in states that do not have their own exchanges.
Gruber also was the Obamacare adviser who famously said the law was passed thanks to the “stupidity of the American voter.”
He’s argued that the intent of the wording was to force states to set up exchanges by punishing citizens if they didn’t.
“I think what’s important to remember politically about this is if you’re a state and you don’t set up an exchange that means your citizens don’t get their tax credits,” Gruber said.
“But your citizens still pay the taxes that support this bill. So you’re essentially saying to your citizens, you’re going to pay all the taxes to help all the other states in the country. I hope that that’s a blatant enough political reality that states will get their act together and realize there are billions of dollars at stake here in setting up these exchanges and that they’ll do it, but you know once again the politics can get ugly around this,” he said.
See Gruber:
WND had reported recently that Obama was accused of trying his hand at “bullying” the Supreme Court ahead of the decision.
Fox News reported Obama was in Europe for a summit when he said it was a case the high court “should never have taken up.”
Obama also claimed it has been well-documented that Congress never intended to exclude people who got their insurance through the federal exchange.
But Jay Sekulow of the American Center for Law and Justice told Bill Hemmer in a Fox News interview: “I think this is almost like a bullying technique. The president here is upset because the Supreme Court took it. Well, there was a conflict in the circuits and when the circuits are in conflict with each other the Supreme Court resolves the conflict.”
Sekulow said the president “keeps saying, well, it’s just four words,” “established by the state.”
But it’s four words, he said, “that carry billions of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars of subsidies with them and it affects the way his law’s being implemented, and IRS – this is the part that everybody forgets – the IRS was the one who changed this rule.
“It’s like a political campaign against the Supreme Court here. … This president has shown a pretty consistent disregard for the Supreme Court when he doesn’t like their opinion,” Sekulow said.
“I think here’s what he’s doing. He’s trying to say if the Supreme Court upholds the law as it’s actually written … then you the America people blame the Supreme Court. The correct response is maybe someone should have read this law before they passed it.”
See the Sekulow interview:
A fifth submission on the topic was filed recently by Judicial Watch on behalf of Kawa Orthdontics, which alleges it was damaged because Obama refused to follow the law as written and impose an employer mandate as Congress ordered.
Judicial Watch said it has filed a petition asking the court to review the case in which Kawa alleges it lost “the value of the time and money it spent in 2013 preparing for the mandate to take effect in 2014.”
That was because Obama changed the deadline written in the law.
The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decided not to address the central question of the case – “whether the executive branch could ‘ignore the clear, congressionally imposed deadline’ of the ACA, also known as Obamacare – because it concluded that Kawa Ortho did not demonstrate injury sufficient to establish legal standing.”
Judicial Watch, in announcing the appeal, said, the question, therefore, is whether “an entity that loses the value of the substantial time and resources it prematurely expended and the time value of the money it spent on anticipatory compliance costs is sufficiently injured to confer Article III standing.”
The case is based on Kawa’s expenditures of “substantial time and resources, including money spent on legal fees and other costs” because of the looming 2014 deadline for the employer mandate under Obamacare.
Then Obama changed it.
Other cases before the Supreme Court have met with mixed results.
It was nearly three years ago that the court decided the penalties in Obamacare were taxes, meaning the law didn’t violate the Constitution.
Then the Supreme Court ruled that government could not force certain employers to violate their faith and subsidize abortions, as Obama had wanted.
Then came this case, over subsidies.
The justices also also refused to take a case about whether the law is an illegal invasion of privacy. The argument is that its Independent Payment Advisory Board – which has been dubbed a “death panel” by critics – is unconstitutional because it would make life-and-death decisions for patients.
The case was brought by the Goldwater Institute, which has explained the case is not over.
“This case is not dead; we’re simply in a holding pattern,” said Christina Sandefur, a senior attorney for the group. “We will bring this challenge again once the Independent Payment Advisory Board takes action.”
“Republicans have a plan to create a bridge away from Obamacare,” wrote Sen. Orin Hatch, along with fellow senators Lamar Alexander and John Barrasso, in an op-ed for The Washington Post, recently.
Their strategy?
First, to give people money to help them “keep the coverage they picked for a transitional period,” they wrote, citing King v. Burwell, a lawsuit that claims that health care recipients in 37 states have been illegally receiving Obamacare subsidies.
“It would be unfair to allow families to lose their coverage, particularly in the middle of the year,” they wrote. “Most of these people have gone through the wringer to get this insurance.”
And then step two: Work with the governors of those 37 states to get them the “freedom and flexibility” they need to shift away from Obamacare and toward some sort of replacement health care system, they said.
They also noted that if a fix would be needed to Obamacare, it would be an “opportunity” for Congress to “stop Obamacare’s damage and create a pathway to reforms that move our health-care system in the direction of freedom.”
Obama has not been willing to allow Congress to make any adjustments in Obamacare because of changes from Congress that such a bill could include.
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