(I know I'm posting the whole thing, but it's only like 6 sentences...please click thru to give Politico the traffic...)
A Texas Republican is taking aim at the Supreme Court after its 6-3 decision upholding Obamacare subsidies with a new bill requiring the justices and their aides to purchase coverage on the law’s exchanges.
Rep. Brian Babin is seeking co-sponsors for the bill, titled the “SCOTUScare Act of 2015” — which refers to a quip from Justice Antonin Scalia’s scathing dissent.
“As the Supreme Court continues to ignore the letter of the law, it’s important that these nine individuals understand the full impact of their decisions on the American people,” the freshman Republican said in a statement. “By eliminating their exemption from Obamacare, they will see firsthand what the American people are forced to live with!”
The King v. Burwell decision this morning is huge. Everything--everything--about the 2016 Open Enrollment Period rested on this morning's decision. And yes, I'm even including the states which have their own exchanges, like California, Kentucky and Connecticut. While those states wouldn't be impacted directly, I guarantee that there would have been some peripheral consequences even for them.
For instance, would a sizable number of self-employed people have moved from, say, Virginia to Maryland due to the 60-90% rate difference they might see between the states? I know it's not easy to just pick up and move your whole family on a whim, but you could be talking about a $500+/month difference for those paying full price...and the difference between having coverage at all or not for those whose premiums had just been cut off. Now, thankfully, we'll never know.
So, for the past few weeks I've been shouting from the rooftops about the other fallout of the King plaintiffs winning: Massive rate hikes next year, which would likely cause a roughly 50% rate hike across 34 states for millions of people.
I based that on the assumption that 2016 rates would already be going up 10-12% on average anyway, plusan additional 35-47%, for a total increase of around 50%. I based this on:
100 x 1.10 x 1.35 = 148.5 (48.5% increase)
100 x 1.12 x 1.47 = 164.64 (64.6% increase)
I decided to be err on the low side of this range, figuring that even a 50% rate hike would be more than enough to make the point.
Please bear with me. I just got dressed (yes, I spent the whole morning in a bathrobe) and I haven't eaten anything today.
I'll have much, much more to say later on today and over the weekend, I'm sure, but for now, just a few quick items.
First, here's President Obama's official statement in response to today's ruling. Video & transcript included. It was an excellent speech (though as several others have noted, it would've been even better if he'd simply walked out, dropped the mic and then walked back inside without saying a word). However, there are a couple of bits which caught my ear:
Yup, there's no denying that all of this sounds like a whole big bag of hurt. Installation, configuration, maintenance and improvement of technical infrastructure costs money, time and know-how.
The funny thing is, if the King v. Burwell plaintiffs are shot down and if Healthcare.Gov ends up in the free and clear to continue operations including providing the federal tax credits, I, for one, would have no problem with some or all of the state-based exchanges making the move to HC.gov.
It's certainly more fiscally efficient (HC.gov has cost somewhere around $250-$300 per enrollee to date, as opposed to the several thousand dollars per enrollee that most of the state exchanges are costing....or, to use an extreme case, the $57,000 per person that Marco Rubio's Republican "Anti-Obamacare" Brainchild, "Florida Health Choices" has cost to date).
6/27/16:In light of the 1-year anniversary of the Supreme Court's King v. Burwell decision...along with the celebration of the Obergefell vs. Hodges decision and today's Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt decision, I've dusted off this post from a year ago...
(THIS IS BEING UPDATED MOMENT TO MOMENT, SO CHECK BACK FREQUENTLY FOR UPDATES)
However, if the courts decide to look at the case on the "micro" level--parsing exact definitions of the word "State" (which seems to be the concensus as to how they're proceeding from the people I've talked to about it), then they'll also have to (or at least certainly should) also look equally closely at two other words: "Establish" and "Facilitate."
So, as I said, depending on how the court defines the terms "establish" (ie, to "establish" an insurance marketplace) and "facilitate" (as in, "facilitating" the purchase of insurance policies through the marketplace), it's conceivable that all it would take for any of the individual states to "establish" their own exchange would be to register a domain name at GoDaddy or wherever and set up a simple welcome/information portal site...which would then lead them to HC.gov for the actual purchase of the policy.
As petty and stupid as this may sound, it's no more petty and stupid than the plaintiff's case in the first place.
But LePage has also tried to take advantage of a wording error with the 2013 law funding energy efficiency programs. While lawmakers wanted $60 million spent to help homemakers use less energy heating their homes, the snafu would have reduced that to $22 million—less than half.
The text error in Maine involved just one word left out—"and." However, it wasn’t just the wording that mattered but also a decision from a body controlled by his appointees, the Maine Public Utility Commission, that ruled 2-1 that there would be far less money for efficiency projects than legislators wanted.
The error came down to this, according to the Portland Press Herald:
