This week, Indiana Attorney General Greg Zoeller filed a lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) challenging its authority to fund Obamacare’s insurance subsidies for individuals and enacting penalties against public employers (such as state and local governments) that don’t meet the health law’s minimum worker coverage requirement. If successful, the challenge would prevent Americans from receiving the government assistance that makes Obamacare’s insurance marketplace plans affordable in the first place.
Zoeller claims that the health law doesn’t permit people living in the 36 states that have refused to set up their own Obamacare marketplaces — including Indiana — to qualify for federal insurance subsidies. He also says that local government employers which don’t meet Obamacare’s requirements cannot be penalized under the law to help fund those subsidies.
Yes, let's ignore the Supreme Court and keep suing until they give us the outcome we want. Never mind the practical upshot of the suit is to make health insurance unaffordable for people.
The argument is based on a technical ambiguity in the law that state-level GOP officials and congressional Republicans have previously seized on in an attempt to undermine the ACA’s consumer assistance. The IRS has issued regulations saying that the law permits and intends the agency to extend subsidies to Americans in all 50 states.
“The fact that many citizens lack health insurance is an issue for policymakers, and my office takes no position regarding the congressional debate over funding the ACA. I never complain when private plaintiffs file lawsuits to challenge the state authority that my office defends; but now our role is reversed and Indiana has initiated this lawsuit asking the court whether the IRS has exceeded its federal taxing authority over state governments,” said Zoeller in a statement. “This respectful challenge is an appropriate role for the Office of the Attorney General to vigorously assert the ability of the State and its political subdivisions to manage their workforces in our American system of federalism.”
And yet Indiana takes federal money for all sorts of federal services. This one is somehow illegal, despite the IRS and SCOTUS ruling on it, because, well nobody seems to have a good argument, but we're more than happy to waste taxpayer money suing over the bad ones.
But that's today's GOP for you.
Posts
1 comment:
This is a scary lawsuit because Indiana's legal argument is a pretty good one - the PPACA text does state that the federal subsidies apply to exchanges established by states, and doesn't specify that the subsidies are available for insurance purchased through exchanges run by the federal government. It's bad drafting in the statute, and the sort of thing that probably would have been caught if the House and Senate bills could have been reconciled (which couldn't happen because of the Republican filibuster threat at the time the PPACA passed), or fixed with a simple piece of technical legislation to clean it up (just as there could be a simple fix to extend exchange-based subsidies to low-income people in states that decide not to expand Medicaid).
Zandar nails this because it's a pure punishment lawsuit - another front in the effort to bring down the PPACA by taking away subsidies from poor people. I think the suit has a pretty good chance of success because it's a simple legal argument that is supported by the text of the PPACA --- and I dearly hope that, if it succeeds (there's not likely to be a ruling for several months, at least), it will be after there has been enough success from the PPACA and enough people who have bought insurance expecting to receive subsidies that it will be seen as a "Republican lawsuit that exploits an unintended error in the PPACA to strip low-income Americans of insurance subsidies." It might actually expose the Republicans' venality in a way that THEY aren't intending by bringing the lawsuit.
Post a Comment