The 11.4 new enrollments in Obamacare for 2015 means 8.6 million now have insurance through the federal health exchange and a very, very large percentage of those qualify for subsidies. That makes the Supreme Court's upcoming consideration of
King v. Burwell, even more fraught. On March 4, the court will hear arguments in the case in which plaintiffs argue that Congress did not intend to allow subsidies for people buying insurance on the federal exchange.
Sylvia Mathews Burwell, the secretary of health and human services, said she did not know how many of the 11.4 million people were previously uninsured. But she said that more than 85 percent of those obtaining insurance in the federal marketplace qualified for premium subsidies in the form of tax credits. […]
Among states using the federal exchange, Florida had the largest number of sign-ups, with 1.6 million people selecting health plans or having their coverage automatically renewed in the latest enrollment period, the administration said Wednesday.
Among states that rely on the federal exchange, Texas was second with nearly 1.2 million sign-ups, followed by North Carolina (559,500), Georgia (537,000), Pennsylvania (472,000), Virginia (385,000), Illinois (347,000) and Michigan (341,000). The administration did not release enrollment data for states that run their own exchanges.
Burwell has a clear message for the court in releasing this data: "The United States Congress would not have passed legislation that would exclude people from states across the country. […] Americans don't want the progress that we have made to be taken away from them." Those states with the highest enrollments—Texas and Florida—also seem the least likely to take action to create their own exchanges should the court decide to strip subsidies away from their residents.
The majority of these states have Republican political leadership which have already rejected a critical part of Obamacare—Medicaid—thanks to the Supreme Court's decision in the first challenge to the law it heard. That purely political rejection of a program that could help millions proves that politics comes before people. If the court strikes down subsidies in these states, there won't be a safety net.