SCOTUS Will Hear King v. Burwell, Affordable Care Act Case, Today

A straightforward explanation of the points at issue is available from Jessica Mason Pieklo at RH Reality Check. A live-blog of the decision as it is issued is provided by SCOTUSblog's Kali Borkoski. Note that only decisions will be live-blogged; live-blogging of arguments from within the chamber is not permitted. (SCOTUSblog has a workaround: aperiodically one of their attendees leaves the chamber and reports. If I recall, that person cannot be readmitted, but I'm not sure of that.)

ACA (Anti-Care Actors)?

If plaintiffs petitioners succeed in persuading the Court to rule that, based on four words in isolation, Congress really intended to punish citizens of states that did not set up their own exchanges (depending instead on the federal exchange), millions of Americans will lose their newly acquired health insurance.

This is Chief Justice John Roberts's second chance to kill and bury the Affordable Care Act... or not. He is regarded as the swing vote on this case. The Act survived the Court's first ruling.

A subset of Republicans has been trying again to kill the ACA ever since. Very probably, if Roberts votes against it, the ACA will go down in flames; if that happens, Roberts will earn his "ace" rating for exhibiting the baldfaced inconsistency of voting against his own earlier ruling. Republicans in Congress whine endlessly about the ACA, but they have carefully avoided constructing their own viable alternative. As always, they'd rather spite the President than save your health insurance.

Is this a great country, or what? (Hint: I'm betting on "what.")

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AFTERTHOUGHT: Scalia is a piece of work. Here's Sahil Kapur at TPM, quoting parts of the verbal sparring in the hearing...

WASHINGTON — Justice Antonin Scalia expressed confidence on Wednesday morning that Congress would act to mitigate the damage if the Supreme Court ruled to invalidate Obamacare subsidies for millions of Americans.

"You really think Congress is just going to sit there while all the disastrous consequences ensue?" he asked Obama administration lawyer Don Verrilli.

The U.S. solicitor general had a sarcastic retort.

"This Congress, your honor?"

The audience in the packed courtroom laughed.

"Yes," Scalia protested, "I think this Congress would act."

...

NO rational person... no RATIONAL person... could come to that conclusion about the TP-controlled Congress we have right now. If the Supreme Court kills Obamacare, I am sure as I'm sitting here that it will stay dead.

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UPDATE: No decision in King v. Burwell today. Not too surprising...

Mitch Admits It: GOPers Don't Have Votes To Repeal Obamacare, But Supremes Can ‘Take It Down’ For Them

Joan McCarter at Kos reports this admission by McConnell, unsurprising in substance but very surprising in the fact that he admits, unapologetically, that our Supreme Court now is a wholly partisan Republican body acting to the detriment of the American people. McConnell would be an asshole if he weren't already a turtle.

Krugman: Obamacare, For All Its Flaws, Meets The Constraints Any Healthcare System Must Meet

Krugman:

...

... Here’s the essential fact about health care policy, which in turn fundamentally shapes health care politics:

Obamacare looks the way it does because it has to.

Once again, for those who missed it: if you want to cover people with preexisting conditions, you must have community rating. If you want to have community rating without a death spiral — that is, if you want to keep an acceptable risk pool — you have to have an individual mandate. If you want to have an individual mandate, you have to have subsidies for lower-income Americans. And that’s Obamacare: a three-legged stool, with all three legs essential.

...

And there you have it, your stool sample for the day.

If politics is the art of the possible, health care politics is the art of the very nearly impossible... and so it is with Obamacare. Originally conceived by old-style Republicans a few decades ago, Obamacare is what is politically possible today. Now it is the intent of today's GOP to use this admittedly clumsy system to bludgeon Obama with a stick they, not he, chose.

Could FDR have compelled a better health care outcome? It's irrelevant; we don't have an FDR in the White House, and we don't have the Republican Party he faced as the opposition. Instead, we have a GOP which has no interest in governing, only in winning an endless series of gotcha games. Obamacare is probably literally the best healthcare system possible... possible in America in today's real world, not in an ideal world, not in a progressive European country, but here and now. GOPers seem incompetent to come up with a replacement, and will probably harm even themselves if they try to uproot the system Mr. Obama succeeded in instituting. Everybody, including GOPers, may as well get used to it.

Think Obamacare Is Crashing And Burning? See These Photos...

... at Kos, from signup locations all around the nation. Note also that acasignups.net says that as of 3/31/2014 (IOW, not an April Fool joke), the grand total of enrollments is 14.6 M—22.1 M. Apparently that's 101.1% of the target for this enrollment period. If I had not already been enrolled in Medicare as of a couple months ago, I'd have been in those lines myself. Obamacare is far from perfect... Medicare-for-all would have been better... but insuring that many Americans is an accomplishment I can only applaud.

As to the GOPer reaction, they're going to regret having so firmly attached Obama's name to this program. Margulies said it well:

Republican Rejection Of Reality

Krugman and Friend

Paul Krugman comments on the extreme ideological obsession Republicans have in two areas, health care and monetary policy, and their utter refusal to accommodate reality in either area. He gauges right‑wing views based on the hate mail in his inbox, a source most of us small-time blog owners don't have in anything near the quantity Krugman sustains:

...

... is what I see a lot in my inbox (and in my reading): the furious insistence that nothing resembling a government guarantee of health insurance can possibly work.

That’s a curious belief to hold, given the fact that every other advanced country has such a guarantee, and that we ourselves have a 45-year-old single-payer system for seniors that has worked pretty well all this time. But nothing makes these people as angry as the suggestion that Obamacare might actually prove workable.

...

Indeed that is a curious belief, and a simple, compelling debunking. We already have such a system, which unfortunately we have limited to old people, and even the success of that system sends some right‑wing nut‑jobs shrieking about socialism and "death panels" (hearing Palin's atrociously stupid phrase, I can't help imagining Captain Kirk delivering the line, "Scotty! it's all those tribbles, hiding behind the death panels!"). Putting aside the wingnut demagoguery, the only thing that is "wrong" with the concept of Medicare for all is that it puts the insurance companies out of business.

And Krugman on inflation:

...

As I said, the other issue where I see this kind of enraged denial is monetary policy. There are a lot of people on the right who know, just know, that the Fed is debasing the dollar and creating runaway inflation. This belief doesn’t seem to have been dented at all by five years of failed predictions of inflation just around the corner.

...

I believe Krugman is as tired of the endless nut‑job repetition of fantasy horror stories as I am. And I think someone as inclined to accept actual socialism for some obvious governmental functions as I am would recognize it if it ever arrived in the morning email.

Krugman's conclusion:

...

On both the healthcare and inflation fronts, what you have to conclude is that there are a large number of people who find reality — the reality that governments are actually pretty good at providing health insurance, that fiat money can be a useful tool of economic management rather than the road to socialist disaster — just unacceptable. I think that in both cases it has to do with the underlying desire to see market outcomes as moral imperatives.

And I suppose there have always been such people out there. What’s new is that these days they control one of our two major political parties.

Damned if they don't. As Americans seems stuck in a permanent two‑party system, they can't really afford one party comprising unbridled economic right‑wing extremists. But I don't see how we get rid of them any time soon.

Boehner Fails, Falls Upward, Successfully Enrolls In Obamacare

Josh Marshall, editor of TPM:

Late last week Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) made a big show of trying but failing to sign up for Obamacare because of the notoriously buggy website. (Actually he appears to have been using the DC exchange site.) He even did a special tweet noting his hopeless situation. Not terribly surprising given the frustrating experiences so many have had.

Actually, it turns out he had successfully enrolled and got a call confirming that about an hour after his tweet. But it gets better.

According to Scott MacFarlane, a reporter for the local NBC affiliate in Washington, reports that a DC Health Care exchange representative actually tried to contact Boehner by phone during the enrollment process but was put on hold for 35 minutes, after which time the representative finally hung up.

Boehner is really a royal son-of-a-bleep, isn't he?

AFTERTHOUGHT: last week, I had a 100% successful encounter with a different federal government website, and I now have a Medicare card in my pocket. Yes, I made two phone calls to the SocSec-Medicare help line, but both were content-related, as the website itself worked flawlessly. Boehner's experience just goes to show that if you want government to fail, it can be made to fail. My experience shows that it doesn't have to.

DC Circuit Strikes Down Obamacare Birth Control Mandate

In yet another instance of pure partisan politics manifesting itself on the federal bench, the DC Circuit Court of Appeals struck down the Obamacare requirement that employer-provided insurance must offer women coverage for birth control. From Julian Hattem at The Hill's RegWatch Blog:

A federal appeals court on Friday struck down the birth control mandate in ObamaCare, concluding the requirement trammels religious freedom.

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals — the second most influential bench in the land behind the Supreme Court — ruled 2-1 in favor of business owners who are fighting the requirement that they provide their employees with health insurance that covers birth control.

Requiring companies to cover their employees’ contraception, the court ruled, is unduly burdensome for business owners who oppose birth control on religious grounds, even if they are not purchasing the contraception directly.

“The burden on religious exercise does not occur at the point of contraceptive purchase; instead, it occurs when a company’s owners fill the basket of goods and services that constitute a healthcare plan,” Judge Janice Rogers Brown wrote on behalf of the court.

...

Judge Brown

Janice Rogers Brown is a George W. Bush appointee, presumably paying off the man and the party who elevated her to the federal bench. But put aside that all justice is politics in this awful age. The ruling interests me not only for its consequences (how many business owners will suddenly get attacks of Catholic conscience and opt out of insuring their female employees on a footing equal to male employees) but for its implied assertion about the nature of protected religious freedom.

Let me pose a parallel example. I oppose war under almost all circumstances, arguably on religious grounds; therefore, under this court's reasoning, I should be able to decline to pay the share of my federal income taxes that underwrites the U.S. military. How well do you think that would work out for me?

Law has to be about actions, not beliefs. Religion is intrinsically about beliefs. Whatever I believe about war, it is no violation of my First Amendment rights to tax me to pay for the US Army just as everyone else is taxed for that purpose. I can pick and choose what I believe as a matter of religion or conscience. I cannot similarly pick and choose what taxes I pay. Those businessmen aren't even being asked to pay for the contraceptives; the government will do that. They just want, allegedly as a matter of religion, to decline to participate altogether.

If this decision stands, I want my tax exemption, as surely as those Catholic businessmen get their exemption from authorizing... not purchasing; the government does that and not the business... contraceptives for employees. In all fairness, neither of us should get the break; otherwise, no law involving government funding of any activity unpopular with any religion, or opposed by anyone's conscience, could ever be sustained.

I'm sorry; there's no way a government could operate on that basis. If these Catholic businessmen are prepared to violate the law as a matter of civil disobedience and uncomplainingly go to jail to sustain their conscientious objection, I might have some respect for them. Otherwise, make 'em comply like everyone else.

Obamacare As Kludge

Paul Krugman discusses how Obamacare and Medicare got where they are with the "help" of the GOP and concludes:

...

No, the assault on Medicare is really about an ideology that is fundamentally hostile to the notion of the government helping people, and tries to make whatever help is given as limited and indirect as possible, restricting its scope and running it through private corporations. And this ideology, at a fundamental level — more fundamental, even, than vested interests — is why Obamacare ended up being a big kludge.

... For now, the priority is to get this kludge working, and once that’s done, America will become a better place.

In the longer run, however, we have to tackle that ideology. A society committed to the notion that government is always bad will have bad government. And it doesn’t have to be that way.

Your economic wellbeing,
GOP model

The GOP ideology Krugman refers to pitches the same shit Republicans have been pitching for decades. It's no more true now than it was in my childhood; it makes no more sense regarding Medicare and Obamacare now than it ever did about Republican plans (if one can dignify, e.g., Paul Ryan's fantasy with the word "plan") for the economy.

If the GOP withers and goes to ground, America may become healthy for the short time (IMHO) before global climate change hammers us for good and all. But if the GOP continues its minority rule by a relatively small group of crazies in one chamber of one branch of government, we aren't going to last even that long. People driven to the desperation of joblessness, homelessness and hunger aren't as particular about whether their approaches to redress are good for the whole society or not, and even Republicans, whatever they may actually believe, cannot live in the chaos that will inevitably ensue.