Sec. Burwell responded in the only rational way possible: By pointing out that if [the Republican Party is] absolutely determined to destroy the lives of millions of likely voters across 34 states (including swing states like Florida, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin) while simultaneously forcing insurance premiums up an additional 35% - 45% for everyone else in those states (on top of whatever they were set to go up already), when it would literally take about 5 minutes for them to "fix" the very issue that they ginned up as the "problem" in the first place, there's not a hell of a lot that she can do to stop them.
...None of the above options involve anything that Sec. Burwell has any control over.
In other words, her only "contingency plan" is "try to convince the Republicans controlling the Supreme Court, Congress or those states to stop being colossal jackasses and actually do something to help the people they're supposed to be serving."
Not a plan likely to succeed, of course...but it's a plan.
A couple quick developments in the ongoing saga of Luis Lang, the guy from South Carolina with serious medical and insurance issues whose story went viral a few weeks back.
I've been occasionally chastized for my occasional use of less-than-professional language. Terms like "pile of crap" or, rarely, more crass terminology.
Now and then I think, "hey, I should probably tone down the language here!"
And then, the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, the 3rd in line to the Presidency, is reduced to issuing grade-school insults taken from 3-month old New York Post op-eds written by FOX News correspondents...
Over at the Washington Post, Greg Sargent notes that Mitch McConnell, as expected, is following the standard Republican playbook when it comes to...well, everything, really: Blame President Obama.
BAIER: Doesn’t this hold some potential problems for the GOP? What do you think the solution is if you have to deal with this quickly?
McCONNELL: Depending on what the Supreme Court decides, we’ll have a proposal that protects the American people from a very bad law. Obamacare was the single worst piece of legislation that’s been passed in the last half century. The single biggest step in the direction of Europeanizing our country…What we will do is offer a proposal to protect the American people.
Setting aside the "Europeanizing" part for the moment (seriously, I always wonder about the impact on foreign policy/diplomatic relations with our allies whenever a Republican says something like this), Sargent lays out the GOP's options:
There's not any new info here, but this bit pretty much summarizes what you'll be seeing across 2/3 of the country in a worst-case scenario:
...HealthCare.gov, the federally run exchange, is where 27-year-old Kathryn Ryan, a restaurant server in Philadelphia, turned for health coverage, as soon as the law took effect.
"I was excited because if it weren't for Obamacare, I wouldn't be insured at all," she says. "I wouldn't have the ability to go to the doctor."
She can afford health insurance thanks to a $200 a month subsidy that brings her premium down to $60 a month.
Ryan, who's also studying social work, is one of nearly 400,000 Pennsylvanians who have qualified for income-based financial assistance. But like a lot of people, she had no idea that a case before the Supreme Court puts at risk the subsidies in states like Pennsylvania that rely on the federally run exchange.
The DC exchange just issued a welcome-but-unexpected update; as usual, they do this weird thing where they're including the cumulative totals dating back to October 1, 2013, which is pretty much pointless (this would be like measuring how well Chrysler is doing in 2015 by counting every car they've sold since 1925).
From October 1, 2013 to April 26, 2015, 106,364 people have enrolled in health insurance coverage through DC Health Link in private insurance or Medicaid:
22,354 people enrolled in a private qualified health plan,
67,761 people have been determined eligible for Medicaid, and
16,249 people enrolled through the DC Health Link small business marketplace (includes Congressional enrollment)
Four words in the law could unravel Obamacare in the Supreme Court. So President Barack Obama is marshaling his own numbers – and an unusual moral weight — to stress the achievements of his health overhaul law on Tuesday.
In a speech to the Catholic Health Association, Obama will talk about the hundred years it’s taken to reform healthcare in the United States, and the millions it has helped over its five years of implementation. With a ruling due by the end of the month that could potentially send the new insurance marketplaces into a tailspin, Obama will warn, the social contract is at stake.
...On Tuesday, Obama will try to transcend the legal issues and political debate and instead focus on what the law has accomplished.
