To Beat Obamacare, Opponents Resurrect an Old Birther Argument
The Supreme Court today is considering whether to hear a challenge to Obamacare that could deprive 8 million people of their newly acquired health insurance. If the court does decide to take the case, though, it will be buying into a legal argument that is frequently deployed by a different group of anti-Obama litigants—those who are trying to challenge the president’s citizenship.
The case, King v. Burwell, is one of a pair of lawsuits (the other is Halbig v. Burwell) seeking to strike a blow to the heart of the Affordable Care Act. As I explained last year:
The argument goes something like this: When Congress wrote the ACA, it said that premium subsidies would be available for certain qualifying citizens who were “enrolled through an Exchange established by the State.” (Emphasis added.) The law doesn’t say that those subsidies are available to people in the 34 states that declined to set up exchanges, where residents must utilize the now-infamously buggy Healthcare.gov, the federal exchange.
That’s where Obamacare opponents see a fatal flaw in the law. The plaintiffs in Halbig claim that they won’t be eligible for tax credits because their states didn’t start an exchange, so they won’t be able to afford insurance. As a result, they argue that they’ll be subject to the fine for not buying insurance, or to avoid the fine, they’ll have to pay a lot for insurance they don’t want. They want the court to block the IRS from implementing the law.
More: To Beat Obamacare, Opponents Resurrect an Old Birther Argument