Countdown for ObamaCare
‘Four little words’ include peril for both Republicans and Democrats
WashingtonTimes.com
Nobody, not even a president, can safely assume that he knows how the U.S. Supreme Court will decide a case before it, but President Obama surely sounds worried that the high court is about to unravel his health care scheme. The case before the court, King v. Burwell, is one of the two most anticipated before the court takes a recess at the end of June. The other is about whether the states and not the federal government can regulate marriage.
Mr. Obama sounded Tuesday, in a speech to the Catholic Health Association, as if he had given up on the law, and had turned to raw emotion, deriding the court and the skeptics of Obamacare. The appeal, he said, “probably shouldn’t even have been taken up.”
He cast the issue as one of “morality,” a curious argument from a onetime professor of constitutional law. Obamacare, he said in an unusual fit of grandiloquence, should be measured for what it set out to achieve, “in a tally of pain and tragedy and bankruptcies averted,” or the “security of a parent who can afford to take her [child] to a doctor,” or “the joy of a wife who thought she would never again take her husband’s hand and go for a walk in God’s creation.”
The issue before the justices, who are required by the Constitution to decide the law and leave moral questions to the preachers and philosophers, is reduced to four little words. The Affordable Care Act sets out in plain English that prospective customers buy health insurance in an exchange “established by the state.” When the Obama administration recognized its sloppy work in writing the legislation, the president authorized a federal exchange so that 6.4 million participants unable to buy in a state exchange could still receive a subsidy to cover the cost of premiums.
The question before the court is whether the law is what the law says it is, or can the law be what the president simply wishes it to be? Given his record of attempting to impose the law by decree, he obviously thinks it only right and just that the Supreme Court fix his sloppy work.
If the court rules against the government, those who received the wrongly awarded subsidies may be required to pay them back. This would be a heavy blow to the pocketbooks and wallets of those who had no choice but to buy insurance on Mr. Obama’s federal exchange.
Anticipating a decision like this, the administration and the Democrats have been trying to place the responsibility for a fix on the Republicans instead of putting the responsibility where it belongs, at the White House. For their part, Republicans have largely been silent, counting on a decision in King v. Burwell that would be a step toward repealing Obamacare in full.
This ignores the elephant in the room. The people who will have lost their subsidies and are faced with personal financial disaster will expect someone to fix it. They won’t care who so long as the fix gets done. The president wants what many in Congress call a “clean” bill (what they mean is a “specific” bill) to tweak those four little words to restore a federal subsidy. The Republican leaders in Congress say they won’t do that and want instead to undo Obamacare.
The Republicans do not seem to be prepared for the fight to come, to make the case that the fault lies with the man and the party that made the mess. A favorable decision by the Supreme Court — which is by no means assured — would be just the beginning of the fight.