[VIDEO] Jonathan Gruber Glaringly Absent From NYT Article on Obamacare Wording 'Mistake'

Say my name. ---Walter White aka Heisenberg in Breaking Bad. New York Times writer Robert Pear  knows his name but he didn't say it in his article about how four words in the Obamacare law was simply a mistake. Pear quotes a number of people involved in the law's writing process but fails to mention the one who was acknowledged as the architect of Obamacare...until it became politically inconvenient to do so---Jonathan Gruber. And the reason why Gruber's name went unmentioned in the article is because of his claim, recorded for all eternity on video, that only state established health exchanges would be eligible for subsidies. -

.Let us now watch Pear make his case in his Gruber-free zone that it was all just a mistake:

WASHINGTON — They are only four words in a 900-page law: “established by the state.”

But it is in the ambiguity of those four words in the Affordable Care Act that opponents found a path to challenge the law, all the way to the Supreme Court.

How those words became the most contentious part of President Obama’s signature domestic accomplishment has been a mystery. Who wrote them, and why? Were they really intended, as the plaintiffs in King v. Burwell claim, to make the tax subsidies in the law available only in states that established their own health insurance marketplaces, and not in the three dozen states with federal exchanges?

Who wrote them, Pear? You know the name of the most prominent of the writers. Say his name. Saaaaay it!!! Okay, since you won't say his name, let us watch Obamacare Jonathan Gruber himself explain how the subsidies work and who gets them:

What’s important to remember politically about this is if you’re a state and you don’t set up an exchange, that means your citizens don’t get their tax credits—but your citizens still pay the taxes that support this bill. So you’re essentially saying [to] your citizens you’re going to pay all the taxes to help all the other states in the country. I hope that that’s a blatant enough political reality that states will get their act together and realize there are billions of dollars at stake here in setting up these exchanges. But, you know, once again the politics can get ugly around this.

Via: Newsbusters

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What Might Happen if Obamacare's "King vs. Burwell" Challenge Is Upheld?

 

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act has only been in force since Jan. 1, 2014, but it's had some amazing ups and downs in its short history.

Known better as Obamacare, the PPACA struggled out of the gate to enroll uninsured consumers due to a host of IT-architectural design issues underlying a number of state- and federally run marketplace exchanges. It took more than two months for permanent fixes to be put into place on the federally run exchange, Healthcare.gov, allowing consumers to finally complete the sign-up process for health insurance.

Fast forward a year and change, and everything is generally running very smoothly. Obamacare enrollment approached 12 million by the end of the 2015 regular enrollment period on Feb. 15. This is well ahead of the estimated 9.1 million enrollees that the Department of Health and Human Services believed would be signed up by the end of the year.

But just because Obamacare is succeeding now in its enrollments doesn't mean the law itself is out of the woods.

Obamacare faces a major challenge
One challenge set to shake things up in the coming weeks is a case being reviewed by the Supreme Court, King vs. Burwell. The plaintiffs in this challenge are focused on the verbiage of the law, which states that subsidies are to be paid to exchanges "established by the State."

As you probably know, not all states chose to establish their own exchanges. Some 37 states -- a figure that seemingly grows by the year -- are now a part of the federally run healthcare marketplace, Healthcare.gov. Some states found it easier to simply join Healthcare.gov from the get-go (especially those idealistically opposed to Obamacare that didn't want to accept federal funds to set up state exchanges). Meanwhile others, such as Hawaii, Oregon, and Vermont, were coerced to join Healthcare.gov after their state-run exchanges failed to either get off the ground or be profitable enough to continue running. But the one thing in common here is that for these states, the federal government is in charge of doling out subsidies on the states' behalf, rather than the states themselves handing them out. The plaintiffs are arguing against this practice and hoping to eliminate it.

Via: The Motley Fool

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