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In the News: A Tale of Two Courts

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A series of tubes filled with enormous amounts of material

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Two Hours After A Court Strikes Down Obamacare Subsidies, Another Appeals Court Upholds Them

A little after 10am Tuesday morning, two Republican judges on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ordered much of the Affordable Care Act defunded. Just two hours later, another federal appeals court, the Fourth Circuit, issued a unanimous opinion upholding the same subsidies that were struck down in the DC Circuit’s order.

As we explained this morning, both cases hinge upon a glorified typo in the Affordable Care Act. Obamacare gives states the option to run a health insurance exchange selling coverage to their residents, or they may elect to have the federal government run this exchange. If read in isolation, one line of the Affordable Care Act suggests that only “an Exchange established by the State” can offer subsidies to help people pay for health insurance in the exchange. The DC Circuit’s opinion relied on that line to conclude that federally-run exchange subsidies must be defunded.

The plaintiff in the DC case is a woman who worked in the Bush Administration in his Office of Faith and Community. Apparently, nothing says “love thy neighbor” like litigating to deny health care to people. The plaintiff in the 4th Circuit case is a man in West Virginia angry that his freedumbs were taken away when he was forced to get health insurance at a cost of $21 per year.  

The entire DC Circuit has been asked to rule on the case and the split on that court is 7-4 Democratic appointees to Republican appointees.

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How The White House Could Still Save Obamacare Even If It Loses In Court

The D.C. federal appeals court initially appeared to throw a stunning legal blow to Obamacare with its decision to invalidate financial subsidies offered through HealthCare.gov. The loss of those subsidies could affect 4.7 million people and send premiums skyrocketing. But the ruling was quickly tempered by a separate appeals court ruling that upheld the subsidies in another case.

[Experts told TPM] that the mechanics of how the workaround could be done aren’t completely clear, but the crux would be this: States could continue using HealthCare.gov but pass a bill or otherwise indicate that the website functions as their state-based insurance exchange.

[Additionally, ] HHS Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell “could make it much easier for a second generation of state exchanges to be established now that the federal government has a viable IT platform for both state and federal exchanges to use.”

Or we could win back Congress and pass a fix to the technical language of the law.

More …

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If Obamacare Opponents Win Their Latest Lawsuit, Here’s Who Loses

Here’s what will happen to the insurance industry if Halbig wins:

– Almost 90 percent of Obamacare enrollees in states with federal marketplaces will lose their tax credits.

– Premiums in those states could increase by more than 75 percent

– The average person with the cheapest plan on a federal marketplace would have to spend a quarter of their income on insurance.

– The number of uninsured Americans would increase by about 6.5 million.

– Obamacare premiums as a whole would be sent into a “death spiral.”

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Charlie Pierce: Affordable Chaos

Let us spend a few minutes in the real world, shall we? Millions of our fellow citizens have spent the last several months with a great weight lifted from their shoulders. Every ache and sudden twinge no longer felt like it could be the first step toward personal ruin. They have been able to look at their sleeping children without a familiar knot in their guts. They have been able to pursue happiness, like all of us have a right to do so, without feeling like they’re running in leg shackles. All of these people have been tossed into uncertainty — again — because their government has been rendered dysfunctional by a political philosophy of nihilistic vandalism, which is being judged now by a judiciary fully politicized through a long game that has extended over decades. […]

Simply put, there is almost an entire half of our political system that believes that a great number of Americans simply do not matter enough to make it economically feasible to help them stay healthy. They do not count. It does not matter how many of them die preventable deaths. It is better for the country, this half of the political system believes, that they grow sick and bankrupt themselves.

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Editor’s Note: Feel free to share other news stories in the comments.


Categories: Uncategorized.

/ 9 Comments

9 comments

  1. JanF

    I think the best solution is to win back Congress and tell half the political system that it is NOT okay for people to “grow sick and bankrupt themselves”.  

  2. JanF

    From NPR News

    Here’s a quick rundown of the officials’ updates on what U.S. investigators have found, from notes taken by NPR’s Pentagon reporter Tom Bowman:

       A U.S. spy satellite detected the launch of a surface-to-air missile in the area just before the plane went down.

       Voice analysis confirms that a phone conversation about the shot-down plane was between two well-known separatist leaders. Their conversation was intercepted and publicized by Ukraine shortly after the airliner was shot down Thursday.

       The weapon that likely took the plane down – a Russian-made SA-11 anti-aircraft missile – wasn’t being used by Ukraine, which the U.S. says has used planes, not missiles, in its fight against the separatists.

    The information comes as an update into the inquiry of how the commercial flight was shot down with nearly 300 people aboard. The U.S. has laid the blame at the feet of the separatists – and criticized Russia for supporting them.

    Analysts believe it to have been “a mistake”. Kind of like the mistake that happens when you hand a loaded gun to a four year old.

    For weeks, U.S. intelligence agencies have been saying that Russia was supplying rebels in Ukraine with weapons. And after today’s briefing, Tom reports that analysts now say “Russian equipment, including tanks and armored personnel carriers, are still continuing to roll into Ukraine from Russia.”

  3. JanF


    NASA: Published on Sep 5, 2013

    This video clip shows the larger of the two moons of Mars, Phobos, passing directly in front of the sun, in an eclipse photographed by NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity.

  4. JanF

    Margaret and Helen

    Margaret, our good Christian Governor down here in Texas, Rick Perry, said he would use his executive authority to activate up to 1,000 National Guard troops to help secure the Texas border region against “criminal aliens.”   Criminal Aliens being Spanish for children, I think.  My Spanish isn’t so good so you might want to look that up.   These are children who were not aborted so Texas just doesn’t have room for them… or compassion.

    Jesus loves the legal children,

    All the legal children of the world.

    Red and yellow, black but mainly white,

    All are precious in His sight,

    Jesus loves the legal children of the world.

  5. JanF

    From her keyboard on the president’s long game:

    … in response to [Republican] obstruction, President Obama implemented conciliatory rhetoric as a ruthless strategy. In other words, his outstretched hand demonstrated the intransigence on the Republican side of the isle and left them with no choice but to embrace increasingly marginalized positions in order to justify their obstruction.

    She cites a recent Booman post where he says this:

       I have a theory that when the Republican Party finally collapses as a national party it will happen suddenly and without much warning. It could happen as early as this November, although I am not ready to make that prediction just yet…

       But the game is nonetheless up. The best movement conservatism can hope for at this point is a flash in the pan confluence of bad news timed at just the right moment to give them the unlikeliest of national victories. This country has totally moved on from their ideology.

    Smartypants’ conclusion:

    In the end, the Republicans chose their own path of obstruction and increasing marginalization. President Obama’s response ensured that would mean their demise…not his. It might take years for us to see the full result of those decisions. But when it all unfolds, it will be one of the most important ingredients of this President’s legacy.

  6. Diana in NoVa

    And there’s plenty to be on fire about. It is sickening that once again the Rethugs are on the warpath against providing health care to their fellow Americans. How do these people look at themselves in the mirror in the morning and call themselves Christians? As a child, when I heard the word “Christian,” I immediately thought, “compassionate, gentle person.” I no longer associate that word with that phrase.

    As for MH17 and the rest of the news it’s just too depressing. Had a fit of the blues last night, in fact, a feeling of Weltschmerz and doom that led me to post that status on FB. Silly thing to do, really.

    This morning the sun is shining, I do feel better, and will try to do something constructive today.

  7. JanF

    On the “anti-democratic sabotage” from the two judges on the DC panel:

    By effectively gutting the Affordable Care Act on Tuesday, two members of a three-judge panel on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals showed how far right-leaning jurists have strayed from such impartiality. We are confronted with a conservative judiciary that will use any argument it can muster to win ideological victories that elude their side in the elected branches of our government. […]

    In ruling to kill the subsidies for an estimated 5 million people on the federal exchange, Judge Thomas B. Griffith invents the idea that Congress may have intended to deny subsidies to people in states that didn’t set up their own exchanges as an incentive for those states to do so. But as Judge Harry T. Edwards writes in his dissent, the “incentive story is a fiction, a post hoc narrative” to justify the idea that “Congress would have wanted insurance markets to collapse in states that elected not to create their own exchanges.”

    The extreme judicial activism here is obvious when you consider, as the 4th Circuit did, that even if you accept that there is ambiguity in the law, the Supreme Court’s 30-year-old precedent in Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council held that in instances of uncertainty, the court defers to federal agencies rather than concocting textual clarity when it doesn’t exist.

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