ObamaCare remains a train wreck, and the U.S. Supreme Court has once again kept it hoisted atop the flimsiest of rails.
Chief Justice John Roberts penned today’s six-justice majority opinion, in King v. Burwell, upholding the Obama Administration’s provision of health insurance subsidies via federally established health care exchanges. The court did so despite the fact that the language of the ObamaCare statute provides no such federal authority, and only authorizes subsidies via exchanges established by the states.
In his opinion, Chief Justice Roberts acknowledged the problematic nature of ObamaCare’s statutory language, but he went on to state, “Congress passed the Affordable Care Act to improve health insurance markets, not to destroy them. If at all possible, we must interpret the Act in a way that is consistent with the former, and avoids the latter.”
One could also argue in the converse, that a hyper-partisan, Democrat-controlled Congress passed the Affordable Care Act, without a single Republican vote, in order to weaken America’s health care system, not to improve it; and that they intended to pave the way for the eventual reconstitution of health care in America under a socialist model.
Chief Justice Roberts chose to embrace the former argument, and ignore the latter. He and five other Justices have based their interpretation of Congressional intent not on the language Congressional Democrats employed when drafting ObamaCare in 2010, but rather on the rhetoric they now employ in defense of their ill-conceived, ill-gotten health care scheme.
The Roberts rationale aims toward a political end. Dressing it up in a legal opinion does not change that sad reality.
PolitiQuick 