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Supreme Court Upholds Key Obamacare Subsidies
HughPickens.com writes: Retuers reports that the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled 6 — 3 in favor of the nationwide availability of tax subsidies that are crucial to the implementation of President Barack Obama's signature healthcare law, handing a major victory to the president. It marked the second time in three years that the high court ruled against a major challenge to the law brought by conservatives seeking to gut it.
"Congress passed the Affordable Care Act to improve health insurance markets, not to destroy them," wrote Chief Justice Roberts in the majority opinion (PDF). He added that nationwide availability of the credits is required to "avoid the type of calamitous result that Congress plainly meant to avoid." The ruling will come as a major relief to Obama as he seeks to ensure that his legacy legislative achievement is implemented effectively and survives political and legal attacks before he leaves office in early 2017. Justice Antonin Scalia took the relatively rare step of reading a summary of his dissenting opinion from the bench. "We really should start calling the law SCOTUScare," said Scalia referencing the court's earlier decision upholding the constitutionality of the law.
"Congress passed the Affordable Care Act to improve health insurance markets, not to destroy them," wrote Chief Justice Roberts in the majority opinion (PDF). He added that nationwide availability of the credits is required to "avoid the type of calamitous result that Congress plainly meant to avoid." The ruling will come as a major relief to Obama as he seeks to ensure that his legacy legislative achievement is implemented effectively and survives political and legal attacks before he leaves office in early 2017. Justice Antonin Scalia took the relatively rare step of reading a summary of his dissenting opinion from the bench. "We really should start calling the law SCOTUScare," said Scalia referencing the court's earlier decision upholding the constitutionality of the law.
This astonishing track record bears repeating: Only 16 out of 50 states chose to create state health exchanges, even though the law stated that by not doing the citizens of the remaining 34 states would not get federal subsidies (the whole point of the Supreme Court case). Yet, of those 16 that did create exchanges, more than half have failed to work or have gone over budget, after wasting more than $4 billion in federal funds. On top of that, three are now under investigation.
The court doesn't need to twist anything. They use week established rules of construction. This is necessary because a single textual document will never convey every nuance.
"We begin with the familiar canon of statutory construction that the starting point for interpreting a statute is the language of the statute itself. Absent a clearly expressed legislative intention to the contrary, that language must ordinarily be regarded as conclusive.:" Consumer Product Safety Commission et al. v. GTE Sylvania, Inc. et al.,447 U.S. 102 (1980).
But the language of the statue has to be understood as a whole.
For example, noscitur a sociis ("a word is known by the company it keeps"):
When a word is ambiguous, its meaning may be determined by reference to the rest of the statute.
That's exactly what the Court did here, and is exactly what most reasonable humans do in establishing the meaning of any word or words.
The text is essentially a hunk of code describing how to execute the law.
The controversial section is a bug.
Do you think the courts should faithfully execute the buggy code, crashing part of the country in the process, or do you think they should fix or ignore the bug and allow the law to execute successfully?
Well, according to one of the law's architects, it was a Feature, not a Bug: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34rttqLh12U&feature=youtu.be
So to answer your question: Yes.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
If the trouble lies with the wording of one part of the law, surely Congress should amend it so it clearly reflects their intent. That's what a functional legislative body would do. And it could happen easily were it not for one party that insists upon acting like petulant children instead of rational and responsible leaders.
At the very least shouldn't Congress act in the best interests of the people they were elected to represent?
Except there's a definitions section to the law that defines the State as "one of the 50 states". But go ahead. Ignore that.
Completely wrong. An Exchange is established by a State if the State designates something as such an Exchange. Doesn't matter who built it, or runs, or whatever. When 35 States refused to designate something as a State Exchange, then the Federal Government created an Exchange in each state.
But the statute clearly says that subsidies only go to those Exchanges established by the State (as defined as one of the 50 States). Even the majority opinion admits this, when they say that the law needs to be taken as a whole, overall intention, rather than those irrelevant little words. This was activist judging of the most blatant sort, when the Supreme Court rewrote a badly and hastily written law to not fall apart because of its own inane mistakes.
SCOTUSCare it is, at this point - They've done more to keep it alive than Obama ever did.
Typos can indeed lead to ludicrous conclusions that can be corrected judicially. This was not one of them.
Apparently, six justices disagree with you...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
The actual architect of the law, as well as some other people involved with the writing, specifically stated at the time the law was being written that the purpose of the tax credit only applying to State exchanges was to force uncooperative states to comply with the law.
There are several videos of full speeches by Gruber where he clearly spells out that that was the intent of the law and why there is no mention of the Federal exchange and credits. It's also why this law specifically defines State exchange as an exchange established by one of the 50 states or a US territories (although Obamacare had issues with territories too).
This was not about fixing a mistake in a law but re-writing it and ignoring it's clear intent to prevent it from falling apart.
Of course that's just my opinion...... you could be wrong!
The intent matters just as much as the plain language. Scalia himself has defended that intent matters more than plain language multiple times including pulling out 300 year old dictionaries. The affirming verdict itself quotes Scalia from the last ruling where he completely contradicts what he claims in this dissent. He's an inconsistent little troll, he rules whatever he wants, not what the constitution requires.
The writers of the law clearly wanted to establish state exchanges for any state that wanted them, and a federal exchange for any state that didn't want to roll its own, and that all of these exchanges do the same thing.
Johnathan Gruber didn't seem to think so. He bragged that the idea was to intimidate conservative states into exchanges by withholding subsidies from citizens of states which declined to create them.
"The act uses the term "the state", not "a state". "
Maybe elsewhere, but not in the context that was being litigated: "established by a State".
The question isn't the meaning of "state," it's whether the drafters of the law meant that "exchange established by the state" included the states that establish an exchange, and implemented it by integrating the state's systems with the federal exchange, or only the states that built an exchange completely on their own. Given that the law was written originally envisioning that all state exchanges were implemented by integrating into a single federal exchange, and the idea of states implementing their own exchanges was added late in the process (at the insistence of Republicans), it's quite clear that the people writing the law had no problem with the idea that states would establish exchanges, physically run by the federal infrastructure.
2/3rds of the Supreme Court agreed.
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
This claim doesn't align with the facts. The original ACA had no state exchanges - those were injected by Republicans late in the process. And even then, the assumption was that few states would choose to physically build their own exchanges, and almost all states would choose to operate their exchanges on the federal infrastructure, because that would be vastly less work/cost/risk. There was no discussion at the time of states losing subsidies based on running on state vs federal infrastructure. In fact, Republicans at the time all assumed that all states received subsidies whether they ran on the federal infrastructure or built their own. The idea that state exchanges run on the federal infrastructure wouldn't get subsidies was invented years after the fact.
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
Unfortunately, Congress is ceding power to both the Executive and Legislative that can only weaken our rights and liberty. They are becoming less and less relevant.
Uh, unless things have changed around here, Congress IS the Legislative branch of the US Federal government.
"A little misunderstanding? Galileo and the Pope had a little misunderstanding."
so when you're bleeding to death or having a heart attack you shop around for the best price, right?
how many different fire houses does a given city have, genius?
does that negate the natural monopoly of fire emegencies?
in fact, fire departments actually used to be private companies. they used to arrive at a fire as fast as possible, then start beating each other up like gangs for the privilege of who would put out the fire. absolutely true
http://jasoncochran.com/blog/w...
should fire departments not put out fires in structures that don't pay their fire dept insurance? should they give bills to people that, if not paid, means your house burn down?
you can see how fucking retarded that is
and we luckily beat the *corruption* and got rid of the stupid system and now have professional fire fighting forces
so why are you such a fucking propagandized moron you can't see the same lessons apply to health care?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
And happening so fast, I can't explain it.
We have this court now, pretty much ignoring the constitution on this law, it really should have been a given, but they seemed more interested in not causing chaos for a lot of people that would have been thrown off the federal dole on this.
We've seen the Rebel flag suddenly become a horrible symbol of oppression, and hate and vilified all of a sudden and yanked even from online stores and private individual sales on ebay.
It is now going so far that there seems to be a rush to destroy history, and take down all statues or anything of confederate soldiers...things no one had ever previously thought were any type of hate symbol, but merely marks of history. I'm shocked in New Orleans there is actual talk of taking down the statue and renaming Lee Circle, an icon of the city for many many many years. That and other statues and landmarks of the city. I mean, if you want to re-write history, lets mow down the French Quarter entirely, I mean lots of slaves were sold through there and used there...etc. Where does it stop?
I'm just shocked at the way folks here are laying down and how fast this is rolling over tradition and history, especially things that have NEVER before been thought to be racist or troubling for anyone....but now the baby is being thrown out with the bath. History...if nothing else, it should remain as a reminder.
The old saying goes...."those that forget history are bound to repeat it".
I'm just flabbergasted that some things are moving this fast, and this isn't all for the better.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........