Morning Must-Read: Henry Aaron, David Cutler, and Peter Orszag: Stop the Anti-Obamacare Shenanigan

Henry Aaron, David Cutler, and Peter Orszag: Stop the Anti-Obamacare Shenanigans: “So far, opponents of the Affordable Care Act…

…have lost every major battle to repeal or invalidate it. Some of them are now urging the courts to interpret the health reform law in a way that would guarantee its failure…. Having failed to undo the individual mandate to buy health insurance, opponents now claim that, under the law, subsidies for low- and moderate-income Americans to buy insurance may be paid only in those states–currently 14–that have set up their own online insurance exchanges. This would torpedo a central goal of the law: the expansion of coverage. At first, those of us who support Obamacare thought these claims were a joke. On July 22, the federal appellate court in Richmond, Va., rejected one such claim, but the same day, astonishingly, the federal appellate court for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled, 2 to 1, in favor of the plaintiff in a similar case, Halbig v. Burwell…. Now the opponents of Obamacare are asking the Supreme Court to immediately hear an appeal of the Richmond decision…. The law specifically instructed the secretary of health and human services to create and manage the exchanges for states that chose that option. And when the law was passed, everyone involved in the law’s passage understood that this directive vested federal exchanges with the same mission and authority as state-mandated exchanges…. Whatever one thinks of the Affordable Care Act, it is absurd to argue that its drafters intended to make insurance unaffordable.

I must say that Republican governors and state-level legislators are already furious at John Roberts for how he forced them to alienate either their activist Tea Party base or their fund-raising medical base over Medicaid expansion. They would be even more furious if Roberts forced them to go through the same thing again–this time not over Medicaid expansion but over state exchange establishment.