SCOTUScare ... and it's still NOT Affordable

The 7 Best Lines from Justice Scalia’s Blistering Obamacare Dissent

Excerpt:

"The Act that Congress passed makes tax credits available only on an “Exchange established by the State.” This Court, however, concludes that this limitation would prevent the rest of the Act from working as well as hoped. So it rewrites the law to make tax credits available everywhere. We should start calling this law SCOTUScare.”

Obamacare still faces these big challenges

Excerpt:

As many enrollees are discovering, the “Affordable” Care Act is somewhat misnamed. Healthcare costs continue to rise faster than wages or overall inflation, putting a financial burden even on people who have healthcare. A recent study by the Commonwealth Fund found that 23% of Americans who have healthcare coverage are “underinsured,” meaning their out-of-pocket spending on healthcare is more than 10% of their income in a given year. Deductibles and other out-of-pocket costs have been rising because consumers and businesses have been opting for plans with lower premiums—which usually require the patient to bear more of the cost before 100% coverage kicks in. The irony is that insurance has gotten more affordable, but actual healthcare hasn’t.

Comment: Image source ... modified with. In our post-modern world words no longer convey absolutes

Updated:

• SCOTUS rules; Welcome to Oceania
• key excerpts from Scalia’s dissent
• 'Jiggery-pokery': The best lines from Antonin Scalia's Obamacare dissent
• Roberts Gets It Wrong Again
• The Anti-Constitutional Consequences of King v. Burwell

Will SCOTUS ruling on King v. Burwell be "nail in coffin" for Obamacare?

Supreme Court to Hear Case on Health Law Subsidies - Challengers Argue Affordable Care Act Only Permits Tax Credits on State-Run Exchanges
Excerpt:

The Supreme Court on Friday agreed to review whether consumers can receive subsidies through the Affordable Care Act for insurance purchased through a federal exchange, taking up a key piece of the Obama administration’s health-care law. The move puts before the high court one of several cases over the subsidies. The justices accepted a challenge from Virginia that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in Richmond, Va., had rejected. The Fourth Circuit in July found in favor of an Internal Revenue Service rule extending tax credits to lower-income Americans who purchase coverage through the federal insurance exchange. Conservative groups, seizing on wording in the Affordable Care Act, have sued, arguing the subsidy is limited to people who buy insurance through state-run exchanges. Federal exchanges are in place in more than 30 states that haven’t established their own exchanges.

Comment: See The real threat to the ACA

A lawsuit known as Halbig v. Burwell has been winding through the courts, and if plaintiffs succeed it could mean the elimination of federal subsidies for as many as 7 million people covered under the program by 2016. It could still take a year or two for the legal maneuvering to play out, and the case could ultimately land at the Supreme Court. The thing to know is that this is a sleeper case with potential ramifications more serious than anything likely to get through Congress during the next two years.

Comment: Image source

Several updates (on 11/8):

• The Supreme Court agrees to hear the federal subsidy case
• Why did the court grant cert in King v. Burwell?
• King v. Burwell is *not* a major constitutional challenge to Obamacare.: "The case now before the court is not making a constitutional claim that Congress doesn’t have the power to pass federal exchange subsidies, but merely that the statute they wrote did not authorize such subsidies ... And the remedy for that claim is very simple. If it truly was the intent of Congress to give the administration the power to provide Obamacare subsidies even in states that did not set up a healthcare exchange, then the Court can simply send the matter back to Congress and have them add whatever authorizations Congress desires to the law."