No more health insurance for them.
Politico hit the big time. It's featured in a new brief filed with the Supreme Court by the lawyers suing the federal government, arguing that the Congress did not intend to extend subsidies for Obamacare to people in states that refused to set up their own health insurance exchanges. The argument is based on one small bit of bad wording in the law, and is refuted by, well, the entire rest of the law. But it was a dubious enough case to get three federal judges—all Republican appointees—to land the case in the second highest court of the land, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, with
Halbig v. Burwell.
The Halbig lawyers latest brief is resting on even flimsier ground—what then-Sen. Ben Nelson told Politico about the bill the Senate passed versus the House bill. Ian Millhiser explains:
Senator Nelson, they claim, demanded that the federal role in setting up health exchanges be reduced. And thus he insisted that each state be given a strong incentive to set up their own exchange. Any state that refused to do so, according to the plaintiffs’ brief, would deny their citizens billions of dollars in subsidies.
But that’s not what happened.
The only evidence the brief provides to support its description of Nelson’s role in the legislative drafting process is a short piece that ran on January 25, 2010 in Politico. Notably, this piece ran more than a month after the Senate passed the Affordable Care Act, so it is not clear how an objection Nelson raised in January of 2010 could have shaped a bill that was passed in December of 2009.
Moreover, even if the Ben Nelson of January 2010 somehow managed to travel back in time to reshape the law, the Politico article the Halbig plaintiffs rely upon still does not support their claim about Senator Nelson. Politico reported that Nelson objected to "a national insurance exchange," not that he objected to what the Affordable Care Act eventually set up—a series of 50 different exchanges for each of the 50 states, some of which are run by the states themselves and some of which are run by the federal government.
Nelson was objecting to the House's version of an exchange, which was one federal exchange covering all the states. That he was opposed to, but he voted for the Senate bill which called for an exchange in every state, with the federal government providing back up for the states that chose not to operate one. Which ended up being the law, as Congress intended.
The law's opponents are basing their case on errant remarks by one of the architects of the law, Jonathon Gruber, which are refuted by contemporaneous comments by Gruber. Now they've added to that flimsy argument this totally fabricated opposition from Ben Nelson. That's just how badly the right wants to take health insurance away from millions—enough to just make shit up.