A Birds Eye View by Jimmy Cardinal Rather than focusing on good governance, Republicans continue to focus on their attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act. These non-stop attacks on the law continue even as the Affordable Care Act has worked for millions of Americans. Even Republican-appointed judges have gotten in on the act now. A ruling last week by two Republican-appointed judges on the US Court of Appeals in Washington, DC, stated that only customers in states where there are state-run exchanges qualify for federal subsidies to help pay for insurance. The politically-motivated ruling by the two judges takes a very literal reading of the law rather than focusing on the law’s clear intent. The idea that lawmakers intended to exclude the citizens of 36 states from qualifying for federal subsidies is absolutely preposterous. The clear intent of the law is that every consumer on an insurance exchange, whether it is federally run or state run, should qualify for subsidies to help pay for insurance. Yet this literal reading of the law now puts 5 million Americans at risk for not having health insurance. In addition, if this narrow reading is allowed to stand, Republicans may have finally succeeded in gutting the law. However, there is still hope. President Obama’s administration will appeal the ruling to the full 11-member appeals court. In addition, another federal appeals court in Richmond, VA, found that all online exchange consumers qualify for the subsidies. Eventually, the United States Supreme Court may have to decide the actual intent of the law. The law does read that tax credits are available to people who enroll through an exchange established by the state. But the lawmakers who wrote the law assumed that states would be establishing their own exchanges. Unfortunately, that hasn’t been the case in 36 states. For example, Governor Scott Walker decided to play politics rather than do what was in his citizens’ best interests. He turned down millions of federal tax dollars (which we still have to pay, that money just goes to other states now) for Medicaid expansion and refused to establish a state-run insurance exchange. The 36 states that refused to establish their own exchange are included in the federal exchange. This ensures that every American citizen has access to affordable health insurance. Only 14 states and the District of Columbia opted to establish their own exchanges. That’s where the literal reading of the law comes into play. Here in Wisconsin we don’t have an “exchange established by the state.” Don’t get me wrong, what a law actually says matters. But the intent of a law matters more. The Affordable Care Act, which is a massive law (2,400 pages), is one of the most poorly written pieces of legislation ever. There is no debate about that. But that is a result of the broken political system in Washington. Rather than having all of the poorly written sections cleaned up in conference committees between Senate and House members, the Democrats had to force the bill through on a simple yay-or-nay vote because they had to get it passed before the Republicans gained a 41st seat in the Senate. When Republican Scott Brown won a special election to fill the late Teddy Kennedy’s seat in Massachusetts, it meant that Republicans could have filibustered the bill to death without fear of cloture to end the filibuster (which requires 60 votes). And while the Founders never intended legislation to require a supermajority in the Senate that is the reality of the toxic atmosphere that exists in Washington. But because the bill is ambiguous, vague and poorly written in certain spots doesn’t mean that a court gets to ignore the clear intent of the lawmakers. That is what the Richmond ruling found. If citizens in 36 states aren’t able to receive subsidies because they can’t get insurance through an “exchange established by the state” because the Republicans in their state have decided to play politics rather than govern, it will destroy the law. That’s clearly the vision of the future that Governor Walker and Senator Ron Johnson have despite the fact that the Affordable Care Act is working so well. I guess it’s easier to be the party of “no” when you don’t have any solutions yourself.
Posted on: Wed, 06 Aug 2014 19:09:13 +0000