King v. Burwell - Bill of Health

Hell Hath No Fury Like An ACA Opponent Scorned

September 14, 2015September 14, 2015 glipper 1 Comment

Flickr Creative Commons/Tabitha Kaylee Hawk

Over the weekend, Ted Cruz again lamented the role played by John Roberts in rejecting the plaintiffs’ arguments in King v. Burwell, the recent attempts to undermine the Affordable Care Act in the Supreme Court. After Chief Justice Roberts wrote the Supreme Court’s 6–3 opinion in the case, the emerging narrative in some conservative circles is that Roberts and his (apparently illegitimate) judicial restraint is to blame. Cruz said that “if [Edith] Jones and [Michael] Luttig had been on the court instead of Souter and Roberts, then the marriage laws in every state would still be on the books and Obamacare would not been law.” Apparently, the same Chief Justice who invalidated a key provision of the Voting Rights Act, went out of his way to reach the First Amendment question in Citizens United, and joined aggressive decisions targeting contraceptive coverage and labor unions is actually a passive Obama apologist who should never have been nominated.

That, I suppose, is one lesson to be learned. Another is that the King lawsuit was so obviously frivolous and nakedly political that even arch-conservative and Affordable Care Act skeptic John Roberts felt constrained to reject it.

Let’s review: in King v. Burwell, the plaintiffs argued that four words in the Affordable Care Act should be read in isolation to prevent the federal government from offering subsidies to those who lived in states that refused to create their own healthcare exchanges. They pressed this argument even though such a reading would have rendered the federal exchanges entirely illusory, stripped millions of Americans of health insurance, and produced the very death spiral the Act was supposed to prevent.

Commentators noted that the plaintiffs’ argument was reminiscent of “an old Amelia Bedelia story” and that it depended on the “Moops doctrine.” And those were the nice reviews. Others described the case as “cynically manufactured,” “mean-spirited,” and a “political challenge … dressed up in legal garb.” The plaintiffs’ counsel didn’t help matters by speaking about the companion case in rather political terms.

More Than Just the ACA at Stake in King v. Burwell

November 19, 2014November 19, 2014 The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

Guest post by Erin Fuse Brown
[Cross-posted from Center for Law, Health and Society Blog]

Commentators have been weighing in since the Supreme Court decided it would hear King v. Burwell, the case challenging the ability of millions of Americans to receive subsidies to purchase health insurance on federally operated Exchanges under the ACA. Debate swirls over whether a decision striking down these subsidies will gut the ACA or not, but at the very least a ruling in favor of the petitioners would have grave consequences for ACA the and the millions that currently receive these subsidies.

There is, however, more at stake in the King case than the ACA. If the Court takes this opportunity to cut down the ACA, it does so at the cost of the principle of separation of powers and the Supreme Court’s institutional legitimacy and credibility.

Chevron

The question in King will be resolved under the Chevron framework, which provides that if a statutory provision is ambiguous, then the court must defer to the agency’s interpretation, so long as it is permissible. Reasonable, learned minds have been disagreeing on the meaning of the statutory provision. As Adrian Vermeule has pointed out, of the 9 federal judges that have reviewed this question, 6 have agreed with the government’s interpretation or concluded the statute is ambiguous, and 3 have concluded that the statute unambiguously precludes subsidies. This type of judicial disagreement is evidence itself of statutory ambiguity. Read More

Another Hole in the Halbig Verdict

August 12, 2014August 12, 2014 The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

Much attention has been paid recently to the contradicting decisions issued on the Halbig and King cases, which challenged the Obamacare subsidies offered to individuals purchasing insurance on federal exchanges. In a piece for Politico Magazine, Abbe R. Gluck finds a weakness in the Halbig plaintiffs’ arguments, in their own words. As Gluck writes:

What’s less known, however, is that in the 2012 constitutional case, these same challengers filed briefs describing Obamacare to the court in precisely the way they now say the statute cannot possibly be read. Namely, they assumed that the subsidies were available on the federal exchanges and went so far as to argue that the entire statute could not function as written without the subsidies. That’s a far cry from their argument now that the statute makes crystal clear that Congress intended to deny subsidies on the federal exchanges.

I am not a fan of the “gotcha” flavor that some aspects of this case have taken on, but the challengers’ 2012 statements are relevant as a legal matter because what the government has to prove to win—as a matter of black-letter law under the Chevron doctrine—is that the statute is ambiguous. (Chevron says that federal courts defer to the relevant agency’s reading of the statute when a federal statute is unclear—here, that agency is the IRS.)

The challengers have spent more than a year arguing that no reasonable reader of text could construe the statute in any way other than denying federal subsidies to insurance purchasers on exchanges operated by the federal government. But what about their statements from 2012—statements then echoed by Justices Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas and Alito in their joint dissent to the Supreme Court’s ruling in the constituitional challenge, NFIB v. Sebelius?

You can read more, including the relevant passages from the NFIB v. Sebelius briefs, here.