White House Has No Backup Plan If Supreme Court Rules Against Obamacare

Millions of Americans could lose their insurance if the U.S. Supreme Court rules against President Barack Obama on his health-care law. And with the decision due in the next two weeks, the government has no backup plan.

The court will say whether tax subsidies under Obamacare that make insurance more affordable for 6.4 million people in 34 states are legal. If it decides they aren’t, that would trigger a high-stakes debate between the administration and Congress over how to respond. Most of the states have no answer either.

A ruling against the subsidies in the health-care law -- Obama’s biggest domestic achievement -- would triple or quadruple insurance premiums, on average, forcing many people to drop out and sending costs soaring for others.

“Chaos would ensue quite quickly,” said Larry Levitt, a senior vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit group that studies health-care policy issues.

There are steps the government could take: States affected by the ruling could set up their own health-insurance marketplaces, called exchanges. The federal government could make it easier for them by sharing the technology behind its healthcare.gov system.

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The distinction between state and federal marketplaces matters because the case hinges on the meaning of four words in the law that appear to reserve tax subsidies to people buying insurance on exchanges “established by a state.”

Opponents of the law sued, arguing that the subsidies shouldn’t be available in the three-dozen states that haven’t established their own exchanges and use the healthcare.gov system instead. Democrats who wrote the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act say that was never their intent.

To The Brink

Many states say that setting up their own exchanges would be too expensive -- or their governments are run by Republicans who refuse to do that. The Republican-controlled U.S. Congress is more interested in repealing the health-care law than in revising it.

“There’s a significant constituency within the Republican Party which is ‘repeal or nothing,’” said Margaret Foster Riley, a law professor at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. “The concern is we’re going to play chicken right up to the brink.”

The first unknown is exactly when that brink would come. It’s possible that a ruling against the administration would end subsidies within a month. But Justice Samuel Alito suggested during oral arguments in March that the high court could stay its decision “until the end of this tax year” to allow Congress time to address the “very disruptive consequences.”

Via: Newsmax

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