Evening Must-Read: Nicholas Bagley: Three Words and the Future of the Affordable Care Act
Three Words and the Future of the Affordable Care Act:
“To help people like my kids’ piano teacher, the ACA extends tax credits to anyone earning between one and four times the poverty level who buys a qualified health plan so long as the individual is ineligible for Medicaid and doesn’t have access to employer-sponsored coverage…. As Michael Cannon and Jonathan Adler read the ACA, however, my kids’ piano teacher can’t get tax credits at all. Nor should roughly 9.5 million other people… Yet… the government’s alternative reading makes much better sense of the statute as a whole and avoids assigning a meaning to the ACA that is blatantly at odds with what the statute aims to accomplish…. To make out their case, however, it’s not enough for Adler and Cannon to show that it’s possible to read the ACA to withdraw tax credits from refusal states. If the statute is ambiguous on that point, it’s black-letter law that the courts must defer to the IRS’s authoritative interpretation (Chevron U.S.A. v. Natural Res. Def. Council, 467 U.S. 837 [1984]). Adler and Cannon… have to demonstrate that the statute unambiguously withdraws tax credits…. They haven’t come close to making such a demonstration…