Showing posts with label health insurance. Show all posts
Showing posts with label health insurance. Show all posts

Thursday, June 25, 2015

Supreme Court Upholds Obamacare in King vs. Burwell 6-3 Decision

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The Supreme Court upheld the law about Obamacare subsidies in the states!!! This is a huge victory for the Obama Administration and for the country as a whole.



In a strong 6-3 decision, Chief Justice Roberts (surprisingly) wrote the the majority opinion in favor of Obamacare, and was joined by Justices Kennedy, Breyer, Sotomayor, Ginsberg, and Kagan. Justice Scalia wrote the conservative dissent, joined (not surprisingly) by Alito and Thomas.



From Huffington Post
The stakes of the case, King v. Burwell, were enormous. Had the plaintiffs prevailed, millions of people who depend upon the Affordable Care Act for insurance would have lost financial assistance from the federal government. Without that money, most of them would have had to give up coverage altogether. And the loss of so many customers would have forced insurers to raise premiums, seriously disrupting state insurance markets.
But two of the court’s conservatives, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Anthony Kennedy, joined the court’s four liberals in rejecting the lawsuit in a 6-3 decision. Roberts delivered the opinion for the majority. And the decision was a concise, stinging rebuke of the plaintiffs, who contended that Congress intended to write a law that would leave so many people without coverage, and cause such disarray.
"Congress passed the Affordable Care Act to improve health insurance markets, not destroy them," Roberts wrote.














Scalia was scathing in his dissent. He clearly wanted to give the GOP a victory, so slammed his colleagues for giving the President a huge victory instead.

From Huffington Post
"Words no longer have meaning," Scalia wrote in the dissent he read from the bench.
. . . "Today's interpretation is not merely unnatural; it is unheard of," he wrote. That is, strictly speaking, true, since this was a new case.
"We should start calling this law SCOTUScare."
"This case requires us to decide whether someone who buys insurance on an Exchange established by the Secretary gets tax credits. You would think the answer would be obvious -- so obvious there would hardly be a need for the Supreme Court to hear a case about it," Scalia wrote, again accurately, though not in the way he meant.
"The Court's next bit of interpretive jiggery-pokery..."
"Pure applesauce," he insisted.











Call a Waaahmbulance for Scalia!

Meanwhile, President Obama called for the GOP to move forward and stop trying to repeal Obamacare for the 60th time.
















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Sunday, June 14, 2015

Senator John Thune Beclowns Himself with Obamacare Tweet

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Republican Senator John Thune, R-South Dakota, beclowned himself this week when he composed a tweet meant to slam Obamacare which ended up sounding like a contradictory circular argument, as if the President will be to blame if the Supreme Court guts the law when they decide the case of King v. Burwell.



From Mother Jones
To an outside observer who may not be terribly familiar with Obamacare (née the Affordable Care Act), this seems alarming. Whoa, Obamacare may cost people their health-care subsidies? such observers may think. And the answer is, haha, well, sort of.
The subsidies that might be lost if the Supreme Court rules against the Obama administration in the case of King v. Burwell are subsidies ... that exist within the framework of Obamacare. Obamacare isn't threatening those subsidies, Obamacare is providing them. The threat to the subsidies lies with the Supreme Court case, which could interpret language within the law to exclude people who signed up through HealthCare.gov from access to those subsidies.

From Bloomberg
How Not to Make the SCOTUS Case Against Obamacare, in One Tweet
. . . On its own terms, this was difficult or impossible to parse. The aforementioned six million people living in states that count on the federal exchange to sell plans were not at risk until lawsuits were filed to end the subsidies. If the loss of subsidies was bad for the American people, then how was that the fault of the administration, who argued against the plaintiffs and called the legal challenge dilatory? Thune's Twitter timeline became a torrent of people wondering what he was talking about. Even conservatives started to ask if Thune realized how tightly he'd been wrapped around the axle.

Twitter had a field day with this one! As it should be!


















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