Afternoon Must-Read: Sarah Kliff: Halbig Says Congress Meant to Limit subsidies. Congress Disagrees

Sarah Kliff: Halbig says Congress meant to limit subsidies. Congress disagrees: “Did Congress intend for Obamacare’s federal-run exchanges…

…to distribute tax credits to millions of enrollees? Two circuit courts have spent a combined 116 pages opining on the issue…. For staffers who helped write Obamacare though, there isn’t really a debate at all. The answer, for them, is crystal clear: they definitely meant to have subsidies available in all 50 states, regardless on who ran the marketplace. ‘It was always intended that the federal fallback exchange would do everything that the statute told the states to do, which includes delivering the subsidies’,”says Chris Condeluci, who worked as tax and benefits counsel for the Senate Finance Committee Republicans during the Affordable Care Act debate…. ‘The evidence of Congressional intent here is overwhelming’, John McDonough, who worked on the Health, Education, Labor and Pension committee during the health reform debate, wrote in an email. ‘There is not a scintilla of evidence that the Democratic lawmakers who designed the law intended to deny subsidies to any state, regardless of exchange status’…