Just for my health care legal junkies … Michael F. Cannon at Forbes, discussion the upcoming SCOTUS King v. Burwell. Sen. Bob Casey (D-PA) and former Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE) are just despicable.
The plaintiffs in King v. Burwell claim the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act only offers premium subsidies, as the statute says, “through an Exchange established by the State.” Members of Congress who voted for the PPACA – most recently Sen. Bob Casey (D-PA) and former Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE) – now swear it was never their intent to condition Exchange subsidies on state cooperation.
While he claims he never intended to condition subsidies on states establishing Exchanges, Casey repeatedly voted to condition Exchange subsidies on state cooperation, has misrepresented what Congress intended the PPACA to do, and continues to misrepresent the PPACA on his Senate web site. Nelson’s claims about what Congress intended should likewise be taken with a grain of salt. In an unguarded moment in 2013, Nelson admitted that in 2009 he paid no attention to “details” such as whether the PPACA authorized subsidies in federal Exchanges.
To this day, Casey still claims on his official Senate web site, “If you like the coverage you have, you can keep it; the government will not force you to change it.” This tells us either (A) Casey does not understand the legislation he voted to enact into law, or (B) he is willing to dissemble to advance his policy preferences.
Nelson matters because, and only because, (1) he insisted on state-run Exchanges rather than a single, nationwide Exchange, and (2) his vote was crucial to get a bill through the Senate, and, since Congress cannot force states to implement federal programs, (3) the PPACA’s drafters therefore needed some way to states to establish Exchanges – a part of the Act that has turned out to be very costly, difficult, and fraught with political peril. So what the PPACA’s drafters do? They adopted a wacky, hair-brained, far-out idea that has been proposed only on numerous occasions by multiple Congresses as well as Presidents Johnson, Nixon, Clinton (more than twice), and Bush. They created an incentive for states to implement federal priorities by conditioning federal benefits on state cooperation.
Enough to whet your interest if you are into this SCOTUS case … (and who isn’t!). Read the rest at the link above.
