Afternoon Must-Read: Bob Laszewski: Halbig Decision Puts Obamacare Back on the Menu

Bob Laszewski: Halbig Decision Puts Obamacare Back on the Front Burner and Will Give Republicans a Huge Political Headache: “In the DC Court ruling one of the majority judges said…

…’The fact is that the legislative record provides little indication one way or the other of the Congressional intent, but the statutory text does. Section 36B plainly makes subsidies only available only on Exchanges established by states.’… This issue never came up…. About everyone also believed some states would not establish their own exchanges. Smaller states, for example, might opt out because they just didn’t have the scale needed to make the program work. I don’t recall a single member of Congress, Republican or Democrat, who believed that if this happened those states would lose their subsidies. At worst, this is clearly a drafting error that in the old days would have been quickly fixed in a technical corrections bill. But these aren’t the old days…. No one risks losing their subsidies until this issue is finally decided….

This would put Republicans in the federal exchange states in a heck of a political bind…. The political consequences for all of these people losing their subsidies and their coverage would immediately shift to the Republicans who control these state governments. Proponents of Halbig argue that the fault for people losing their coverage would be on the Obama administration because they have operated Obamacare in an illegal manner…. Millions of people would have their insurance yanked out from under them in what people will see as part of the ongoing partisan political wars being waged by people out of touch with life in the rest of the country. The fundamental problem the Halbig proponents have here is that common sense, whatever a court rules, tells people that denying subsidies in half the states was never the intent of the Congress–that this is all about political point scoring and stopping a law Republicans hate…. Obamacare’s most partisan and ideologically opposed enemies scored a big victory today…. But below the surface lots of sensible Republicans must be sweating bullets.