Hours After Anti-Obamacare Lawyers File Brief, An Ally Reveals That The Brief's Key Claim Is False

[applegrove]

Hours After Anti-Obamacare Lawyers File Brief, An Ally Reveals That The Brief's Key Claim Is False

BY IAN MILLHISER at Think Progress

http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2015/02/19/3624764/hours-anti-obamacare-lawyers-file-brief-ally-reveals-briefs-key-claim-false/

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Lawyers and activists seeking to enlist the Supreme Court in a crusade against Obamacare face a challenging task. On the one hand, the justices are far more likely to side with the plaintiffs in a lawsuit attacking the law if they believe that such a decision will have relatively modest repercussions. On the other hand, these lawyers and their allies have actively and, at times, loudly, touted their unwillingness to restore the health care that millions of Americans would lose if the justices allow themselves to be drafted into this crusade.

On Wednesday evening, one of the central figures in this lawsuit offered a stark reminder of why it is difficult to send one message to your friends and a different message to the Supreme Court. That evening, lawyers asking the Supreme Court to defund much of the Affordable Care Act and strip health insurance from millions of Americans filed their final brief before the justices. Only a few hours later, however, one of the architects of this lawsuit undercut a core claim in the brief. Though the lawyers seeking to gut Obamacare are telling the justices that it will be no big deal if they support this effort, because the states can step into the gap and restore what the justices took away, these lawyers’ key allies are already making plans to ensure that the states will do nothing of the sort.

The plaintiffs in King v. Burwell claim that the Affordable Care Act gave each state, including states led by staunch opponents of Obamacare, the ability to prevent much of the law from functioning within their state. The law says that states should have “flexibility” to decide whether to set up an exchange where their residents can buy health insurance, or whether to allow the federal government to do so for them. Nevertheless, the King plaintiffs claim that billions of dollars worth of tax credits that help people pay for insurance are unavailable in states with federally-run exchanges. If the justices agree with this misreading of the law, it could set off a “death spiral” of rising premiums and shrinking insurance markets that ultimately collapses the individual health insurance markets in many states.

In their first brief to the Supreme Court, the plaintiffs’ attorneys claim that this structure — where states either set up their own exchange or deny one of the law’s central benefits to their citizens — was an intentional design. “Congress used a variety of ‘carrots’ and ‘sticks’ to induce states to establish Exchanges voluntarily,” according to the plaintiffs’ opening brief, and one of the “sticks” was the threat of lost subsidies. The lawyers offered little evidence that Congress intentionally designed the law this way, however, and new information has since emerged which undermines what little evidence they do offer.


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[Cha]

1. KICK

[Manifestor_of_Light]

2. I'm thinking that

if you live in one of the states that didn't set up their own exchange, and didn't want that evil Obamacare, that might be a violationo f the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.