The upcoming Supreme Court decision in the Burwell case is making the journalist fellow-travelers on the Left very nervous these days. You can tell because they are stamping their tiny feet and demanding that the Republicans will suffer at the polls in the next election if they don’t do something about it!
Prepare to be shocked, shocked, shocked! It’s increasingly looking like Republicans won’t have any contingency plan in place if the Supreme Court guts subsidies for millions in three dozen federal exchange states. Jonathan Cohn has a must-read this morning in which he reports that there are no signs of any public Congressional debate among Republicans about this contingency fix.
As Cohn notes, there’s a reason Republicans aren’t offering any temporary contingency fix or broader health reform alternative: They don’t agree with the idea of “creating a truly universal coverage system in which everybody has access, regardless of income or health,” because that “requires some combination of regulation, taxes and redistribution.”
New HHS numbers illustrate that the stakes have only grown higher: Some 6.4 million people are now at risk of losing subsidies nationally. The Kaiser Family Foundation has created a nifty new table that allows us to break down the situation by state.
Oh, my God! At risk of losing subsidies for something that didn’t even exist just a few years ago! But this is how the Left, operating under its own version of the Brezhnev Doctrine, operates: once something is done, it’s done forever, and only be “fixed” but never repealed.
It shows that the greatest numbers of people who stand to lose subsidies live in states that are key presidential battlegrounds and home to some of the most contested Senate races of the cycle:
What was that definition of chutzpah again? As Leo Rosten put it: “that quality enshrined in a man who, having killed his mother and father, throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan.”
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