If you didn't know better, you could almost get the impression that the White House lacking an ObamaCare "Plan B" was the whole idea all along:
Millions of Americans could lose their insurance if the U.S. Supreme Court rules against Barack Obama on his health-care law. And with the decision due in the next two weeks, the government has no backup plan.
Stop the tape. Remember when ObamaCare itself caused millions of Americans to lose their health insurance almost two years ago? Oh, but that was soooooo long ago. And I suppose the voters did take out their rage on the Democrats for it last November. Now, any of us that do still remember that atrocity won't any longer if the Supremes defy their "king". THAT, we would be required to remember for all eternity.
The court will say whether tax subsidies under ObamaCare that make insurance [less un]affordable for 6.4 million people in thirty-four States are legal.
No, Bloomberg News, we already know the subsidies are illegal. A chimpanzee knows the subsidies are illegal - at least ones that can read. The SCOTUS does not possess the constitutional authority (although they do have the power, which is the core of the problem) to dub a law "legal" or "illegal," any more than a freshly painted automobile lacks a color until the detailer "gives" it one. It's, say, blue, from the last brushstroke (or spray droplet, or however they do it). Just as federal subsidies for federally-obtained ObamaCare policies are illegal, because they're not authorized in the Unaffordable Care Act itself. Which should not require nine robed chimpanzees to tell us. Period.
My God, getting rid of the "Judicial Review" mentality is going to be a Sisyphean task.
If it decides they aren’t, that would trigger a high-stakes debate between the administration and Congress over how to respond. Most of the States have no answer either.
More like a panicked elephant stampede in the wrong direction.
A ruling against the subsidies in the health-care law -- Obama’s biggest domestic "achievement" -- would triple or quadruple insurance premiums, on average, forcing many people to drop out and sending costs soaring for others.
No, Bloomberg News, ObamaCare itself has already triggered that premium tripling or quadrupling. The illegal federal subsidies are just artificially masking it to "consumers" (hostages?) and spreading the cost over the rest of us. You could also call it the at-least partial restoration of the free market pricing mechanism, once again communicating to "consumers" that ObamaCare is a viciously exorbitant fraud that, had it been concocted in the private sector, would have landed its architects in jail for decades. Then they could make the informed, rational, and unanimous decision to scrap it and return to capitalist health care reform.
But that's not how hostage negotiations work, now is it?
“Chaos would ensue quite quickly,” said Larry Levitt, a senior vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit group that studies health-care policy issues.
Chaos ensued in the fall of 2013, Larry, and has raged ever since. A sane SCOTUS ruling would just pull the scab off of that deep wound.
But as I've been repeatedly saying, a sane ruling from the same SCOTUS that illegally upheld the illegal Individual Mandate is highly unlikely:
The first unknown is exactly when that brink would come. It’s possible that a ruling against the administration would end subsidies within a month. But Justice Samuel Alito suggested during oral arguments in March that the high court could stay its decision “until the end of this tax year” to allow Congress time to address the “very disruptive consequences.”
Six months, Justice Alito? Do you even watch C-SPAN?
“Most of the court would be reluctant to come down with a decision that would immediately end insurance subsidies for millions of Americans, so I think there will be pressure in the court to find a decision that won’t do that,” said Hank Greely, director of the Stanford University Center for Law and the Biosciences.
Precisely. And that's another core part of the problem. The federal judiciary is supposed to apply the law. They're not empowered to make it - that's Congress's imprimatur - nor are they empowered to execute it - the purview of the president. The courts were designed and intended to be the weakest of the three branches of government, and the most apolitical.
And yet here is Bloomberg news, blithely and thoughtlessly and ignorantly tossing off about the "adviseability" of the Supremes carrying out their constitutional role versus making a political decision in defiance of the law AND what is supposed to be the law of the land.
Which is, alas, the most likely outcome.
Yet a court-ordered delay would be highly unusual. The Supreme Court hasn’t done that since it stayed a 1982 decision that otherwise would have shut down the nation’s bankruptcy courts.
It would also be a political decision, not a legal one. Which dismays me, at least a little, about Justice Alito's judicial temperment.
U.S. Solicitor General Donald Verrilli said during oral arguments that even a stay until the end of the tax year wouldn’t provide enough time for States to set up their own [cartel]s. That means attention would rapidly shift to Capitol Hill, where Republican congressional leaders say they’d have leverage to force significant revisions to the health-care law.
That they would, of course, never use, because that leverage is only theoretical, not real.
THIS would be the leverage:
If Obama loses at the court, he’d probably pressure Republicans to quickly adopt a simple fix by highlighting the harm facing average Americans.
Harm that he inflicted, but which would be hidden behind an adverse SCOTUS ruling.
“The president’s going to trot out people on dialysis, people getting cancer treatment, he’s going to pull out the full-court press on this,” Josh Blackman, an assistant professor at the South Texas College of Law who filed a brief with the Supreme Court supporting plaintiffs in the case, said in a phone interview.
Indubitably. Anybody who thinks congressional Republicans could withstand this kind of political pressure for longer than thirty seconds, stand on your head. But then, they'll never have to, because the SCOTUS won't be able to do so either.
But if both elective branches of the federal government did miraculously stand, steadfast, for the rule of law, the Constitution, and the healthcare of the American people that can only truly be provided through the free market, we all know what his infernal majesty would do then, now don't we?
Yep, out would come the pen, phone, and magic putter yet again:
One last possibility: The Obama administration can use its regulatory power to try to forge a solution. For example, the government could declare States that still regulate their own insurance plans to have State-run exchanges. That’s considered legally questionable.
Yeah, but so were federal subsidies for federally-obtained policies, and yet here we are. And you know what that would mean: Yet another "landmark" ObamaCare case in 2017!
Exit question: Does ObamaCare cover Dramamine?
UPDATE: Meanwhile, back at the fraud:
The Office of Inspector General has discovered the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) cannot verify the accuracy of almost $3 billion in subsidies for Obamacare customers paid to insurance companies in 2014.
The OIG's report says the failure to verify the payments were made properly puts "a significant amount of federal funds are at risk."
The OIG found the problem existed between January and April 2014, and the root cause was due to a lack of internal controls. [emphases added]
Even an old, obsolete ex-accountant like me can't help but face-palm at that non-revelation. Especially since the "solution" always is and inevitably always will be to just pour billions more down the same Cauchy horizon. Which House Speaker John Boehner is busily getting ready to do, or so I conclude from the fact that he's steadfastly vowing to do the opposite:
House Speaker John Boehner said Tuesday the ObamaCare system is "fundamentally broken" and lawmakers are working to come up with alternative programs to replace it.
"We're moving forward on legislation to bring reform and innovation to our healthcare system. ObamaCare is fundamentally broken," Boehner said. "Americans can't afford it, and so the House is going to take action this week on solutions that will lower costs and expand access to quality health care."
Yes, of course, Mr. Speaker. But could you please send me, say, a million of that three billion? 0.03% of it? That's a drop in your bucket that would keep mine filled for the rest of my life. If you guys are, you know, blindly giving it away anyway.
Boehner? Boehner?
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