How A Stray Remark By A Republican Governor Could Save Obamacare From The Supreme Court

http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2015/01/06/3608604/how-a-stray-remark-by-a-republican-governor-could-save-obamacare-from-the-supreme-court/

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s (R) plan if the Supreme Court reinterprets Obamacare to take health care away from hundreds of thousands of his constituents is to “do nothing,” according to a local news report, even though he and his fellow Wisconsin Republicans have the power to save these individuals from that fate. This may not be a particularly surprising revelation, as Republican elected officials throughout the country have done little to conceal their disdain for the Affordable Care Act, yet Walker’s willingness to admit this fact could have the ironic result of saving Obamacare from the justices. As Brian Beutler explains in the New Republic, the Court’s five Republican members are much more likely to “play along” with an effort to undermine health reform “if the repercussions are likely to be modest.” Walker’s admission drives home the fact that these repercussions will be quite severe.

This March, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in King v. Burwell, a lawsuit seeking to gut the Affordable Care Act by cutting off tax credits that help make health insurance affordable for people who purchase it through Obamacare exchanges. Under Obamacare, states have a choice whether to set up their own exchange or to allow the federal government to set it up for them. As one of Walker’s fellow Republican governors, Nebraska Gov. Dave Heineman, explained in 2012, “[o]n the key issues, there is no real operational difference between a federal exchange and a state exchange.” Nevertheless, the plaintiffs in King claim that the law denies tax credits to people who live in states that elected to let the federal government operate their exchange.

These plaintiffs rely on seven words of the Affordable Care Act which, if read entirely in isolation, seem to suggest that tax credits are only available to people who enrolled in a health plan purchased “through an Exchange established by the State.” Yet, reading the law this way is a bit like reading one line of The Hunger Games and concluding that it is a treatise about the dangers of eating poison berries. Another provision of the law makes clear that any exchange, regardless of whether it is set up by a state or the federal government will be deemed “a governmental agency or nonprofit entity that is established by a State.” And this is just one of several provisions which make clear that the King plaintiffs’ reading of the law is erroneous.