Bill Press: Down to the numbers

There should be a law: If a case can’t pass the laugh test, it can’t be considered by the Supreme Court. 

By that test, King v. Burwell, the latest challenge to ObamaCare, argued before the court last week, would never have made it so far. It would’ve been laughed out of court as a sick, mean-spirited joke.

{mosads}First, let’s be clear what this case is all about. It’s not a serious constitutional issue. It’s pure politics. 

King v. Burwell is a follow-up to 55 meaningless votes by House Republicans to defund the Affordable Care Act. It’s the sequel to the legal challenge to the individual mandate, rejected by the high court in July 2012. It’s the last gasp of Obama haters to kill ObamaCare. Michael Greve of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which is funding the latest lawsuit, left no doubt when speaking about the ACA in 2010: “This bastard has to be killed as a matter of political hygiene. I do not care how this is done, whether it’s dismembered, whether we drive a stake through its heart, whether we tar and feather it and drive it out of town, whether we strangle it.”

Consider what the anti-
ObamaCare forces are claiming: Because of four, little words, “established by the State,” buried in 906 pages of the Affordable Care Act and more than 10,000 pages of rules and regulations, the entire program, now the law of the land for five years, should be gutted. Based on those four words, they argue, only those who bought a health insurance policy from a state exchange should qualify for federal subsidies.

Those subsidies are the heart of ObamaCare, of course, because without them, most new people who signed up could not afford to buy health insurance. Ideally, they’d purchase their policies through a state exchange. But in those 37 states that aren’t on their own exchanges — mainly Republican-led states — the ACA offered families the alternative of using a federal exchange.

The argument that, based on four words, ambiguous at best, only those who signed up through a state exchange qualify for a federal subsidy is absurd — and offered with zero supporting evidence. Why would Congress deny access to healthcare to millions of Americans simply because their governors refused to cooperate? That was clearly not congressional intent. At no time in 53 meetings of the Senate Finance Committee, 25 consecutive days of debate on the Senate floor or similarly endless hearings and debates in the House did any member of Congress propose that subsidies be available only through state exchanges.

What’s at stake? An estimated 8.2 million low- and middle-income Americans who signed up through the federal exchange will lose their health insurance because they can no longer afford it. And according to an amicus brief filed by 22 deans of public health schools, 9,800 Americans would die unnecessarily every year. 

But don’t tell supporters of the lawsuit that. They don’t care how many people they kill. They just want to kill ObamaCare.

Bill Press is host of “The Bill Press Show” on Free Speech TV and author of The Obama Hate Machine.