Monday, June 8, 2015

A Supreme Court Decision Gutting Obamacare Subsidies Will Highlight Republi-CON Hypocrisy

UPDATE:  "Republican leaders in Congress have been promising to craft a detailed Affordable Care Act alternative ever since President Barack Obama signed the law in March 2010. But while Republicans have found time to vote on repealing the health care law more than 50 times -- and have worked hard, as they did on Tuesday, to pass modifications that would benefit powerful special interests like the medical device industry -- they’ve yet to move a single Obamacare alternative through committee and to the floor. Nor has any committee with relevant jurisdiction held even a single hearing on how to handle the aftermath of a potential Supreme Court ruling that wipes out tax credits in two-thirds of the states. . .

Republicans' history of promising and then not delivering comprehensive health care legislation -- a history, after all, that goes back decades -- hints at a deep, fundamental disagreement with the entire idea. Republicans will talk up the importance of helping people with pre-existing conditions or providing financial assistance to people for whom insurance is too expensive. But creating a truly universal coverage system -- in which everybody has access, regardless of income or health -- requires taking steps that many conservatives simply can’t abide.

Specifically, universal coverage requires some combination of regulation, taxes and redistribution (from healthy to sick, and from rich to poor) that Republicans tend to find economically destructive, morally noxious or both. That's true of wholly nationalized, single-payer systems like you find in France or Taiwan. It's true of universal schemes of regulated private insurance, like they have in the Netherlands, Singapore and Switzerland. It's even true of programs in the U.S. that have existed for a long time -- not just Medicare but also, to some extent, employer-sponsored insurance."

Read The Huffington Post, The Real Reason Republicans Don't Have A Contingency Plan For Obamacare.

"Prepare to be shocked, shocked, shocked! It’s increasingly looking like Republicans won’t have any contingency plan in place if the Supreme Court guts subsidies for millions in three dozen federal exchange states. . .

Some 6.4 million people are now at risk of losing subsidies nationally. . .

It shows that the greatest numbers of people who stand to lose subsidies live in states that are key presidential battlegrounds and home to some of the most contested Senate races of the [2016 election] cycle". 

Read the Washington Post, The stakes in Obamacare lawsuit just got a whole lot higher.