Sisters hold a sign at a rally outside of the Supreme Court during arguments in the King v. Burwell case on March 4, 2015. (Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call File Photo)
With each passing day of Supreme Court suspense, the image of the dog catching the bus has come more warily into focus for congressional Republicans.
The wait could end as soon as Thursday, when the justices are expected to announce rulings in a few of the 17 cases remaining on this year’s docket. If there’s still no decision on the fate of the landmark health care law, many GOP members will indulge in a collective sigh of relief — because they will have been given a little more time to cobble together plans for a moment they’ve spent five years dreaming about.
There has been a striking disconnect between the overriding Republican policy wish for this decade, which is to see President Barack Obama’s signature domestic policy achievement eviscerated, and the party’s preparations for the very real possibility that wish could be granted. The volume and passion of their relentless Obamacare criticism has been inversely proportional to their public level of coordination and precision about what they’d do differently.
Their longstanding “repeal and replace” mantra has been all about the former until recently, although the political imperative to come up with a replacement has advanced from the theoretical to the potentially imminent as King v. Burwell has progressed to one step from ultimate resolution.
The Supreme Court has the power to take away a central tent pole of the law, the medical coverage subsidies now being provided to about 6.4 million people in the 34 states where the federal government runs the insurance marketplaces. The plaintiffs in the lawsuit argue the wording of the law only permits those subsidies for people buying coverage from health exchanges run by states. The Obama administration says some sloppy legislative drafting should not be allowed to countermand the statute’s universally understood intent.
But if the court calls a halt to the federal marketplace subsidies, the economic pain will be immediate for millions of potential 2016 voters, many of them in presidential and congressional battleground states.
The subsidies, delivered as a tax credit to people with lower incomes, average $272 a month, meaning without them many will no longer be able to afford any coverage.
The biggest population affected would be in Florida, where 1 in 12 people younger than 65, or 1.3 million, are now getting federal help. The same is true for 3 percent or more of the adults in the likely presidential swing states of Michigan, Virginia, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
No comments:
Post a Comment