Conservatives are all a-flutter over the U.S. Supreme Court’s announcement Friday that it will hear another challenge to the Affordable Care Act in a case they hope will destroy President Barack Obama’s signature health care law.
The case, King v. Burwell, will hinge on proving that the ACA as written doesn’t provide tax credits to Americans in the 30-plus states that didn’t create their own exchanges but instead had users sign up through the federal exchanges.
That should be more difficult than it would seem, since at the time the ACA was enacted, it was well understood that without the subsidies the individual mandate was not viable as a mechanism to create a stable insurance market.
The law clearly provides those same credits to people who bought insurance through the state exchanges, but challengers argue that poor wording in one section doesn’t make it clear, though in subsequent sections of the law, the intent is clearly defined.
On the heels of the court’s announcement, conservatives — ever spiteful — posted a new video of MIT economist and ACA architect Jonathan Gruber, who during a panel discussion, made less-than-thoughtful remarks about writing the law in a “tortured” way to have it not look or feel like a tax. Why? Because voters — actually Congress — wouldn’t pass a tax.