The Argument That Wasn’t

Guest Blogger Abigail R. Moncrieff of the Boston University School of Law and a speaker at the Petrie-Flom Center’s “King v. Burwell and the Future of the Affordable Care Act” conference on April 1 has a new piece up at the Health Affairs Blog discussing the Supreme Court’s decision. From the piece: 

Last Christmas, I spent a somewhat panicky inter-semester break writing an amicus brief for King v. Burwell. I was worried that five Supreme Court justices were going to be too tempted by the plaintiffs’ legalistic interpretation of Obamacare’s text, despite ample evidence beyond the text that Congressnever intended to deprive citizens in 34 states of health insurance subsidies.

In a seminar I taught at Boston University, one of my students had proposed a legalistic version of the common sense point that Congress could not possibly have intended the plaintiffs’ result—a legalistic argument that could be fatal to the plaintiffs’ case but that the government could not make—and I decided to spend my break writing and submitting it. […]

Read the full piece here.

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