{"id":21995,"date":"2014-12-01T19:12:51","date_gmt":"2014-12-02T00:12:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/?p=21995"},"modified":"2014-12-01T19:12:51","modified_gmt":"2014-12-02T00:12:51","slug":"obamacare-poorly-written-no-matter-how-you-spin-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/21995\/obamacare-poorly-written-no-matter-how-you-spin-it\/","title":{"rendered":"ObamaCare Poorly Written No Matter How You Spin It"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nationaljournal.com\/health-care\/is-the-left-helping-scotus-destroy-obamacare-20141130 \" target=\"_blank\">National Journal<\/a> has a piece warning liberals not to dismiss the latest Supreme Court challenge to ObamaCare.<\/p>\n<p>Specifically, it argues that liberals shouldn\u2019t rely on the idea that the disputed statutory text \u2013 the part that limits federal subsidies to buy health insurance only to plans bought on an exchange \u201cestablished by the State\u201d \u2013 is simply a typo that can be brushed aside as a drafting error. Doing so would empower conservatives on the Court to say, in essence, that \u201cthey see the error, are powerless to fix it, and so must dismantle the statute.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>But here\u2019s where the analysis goes off the rails. According to the NJ writer, the subsidies challenge should fail because \u201cif you read the whole Affordable Care Act, taken together, the \u2018established by the State\u2019 line loses its clarity.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>In other words, when we read the relevant part of a federal statute and discover that it makes other parts of the same law undesirable \u2013 e.g. unsubsidized and thus unaffordable health insurance \u2013 the judges should ignore the plain text and substitute what they think Congress really intended.<\/p>\n<p>That\u2019s the kind of judicial activism that conservative justices like Antonin Scalia despise.<\/p>\n<p>Or is it?<\/p>\n<p>\u201c\u2026ObamaCare supporters have a pretty strong argument on the textual side because judges \u2013 even strict constructionists like Justice Antonin Scalia \u2013 have consistently said that courts should read the entire law as one unit when handling questions of statutory interpretation,\u201d writes the author.<\/p>\n<p>But that\u2019s only true if the specific section under review is ambiguous. Zooming out to look at the entire law isn\u2019t necessary when it\u2019s plain to see that subsidies are clearly prohibited when States don\u2019t operate their own exchanges. If ObamaCare is clear in the details and only loses clarity when read as a whole, that\u2019s a problem for Congress to correct, not the Court.<\/p>\n<p>No matter which way you read the subsidies provision, ObamaCare is proving itself to be a very badly written law.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>National Journal has a piece warning liberals not to dismiss the latest Supreme Court challenge to ObamaCare. Specifically, it argues that liberals shouldn\u2019t rely on the idea that the disputed statutory text \u2013 the part that limits federal subsidies to buy health insurance only to plans bought on an exchange \u201cestablished by the State\u201d \u2013 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[35,2249,92],"class_list":["post-21995","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts","tag-obamacare","tag-subsidy","tag-supreme-court"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21995","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21995"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21995\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21999,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21995\/revisions\/21999"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21995"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21995"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21995"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}