Supreme Court Once Again Saves ObamaCare by Rewriting It
“We should start calling this law SCOTUScare,” Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, using the acronym for the court, declared Thursday as a majority of his colleagues once more rewrote the Affordable Care Act (ACA) to save it.
In the case of King v. Burwell, the court ruled 6-3 that the plain language of the ACA means something entirely different. Although the law specifically states that refundable tax credits for the purchase of insurance are available only when coverage is bought on “an exchange established by the state,” the majority — Chief Justice John Roberts along with Justices Anthony Kennedy, Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor — found this phrase “ambiguous.”
“If the statutory language is plain, we must enforce it according to its terms,” Roberts wrote for the majority. Indeed, he observed, “petitioners’ arguments about the plain meaning … are strong.” But Roberts, who also helped rescue ObamaCare in 2012 by recasting its penalties as taxes and changing the terms of its Medicaid expansion, found that “the context and structure of the act compel us to depart from what would otherwise be the most natural reading of the pertinent statutory phrase.”
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