Though there are a lot of misunderstandings when it comes to the case challenging the federal exchange subsidies in President Obama’s healthcare law, there is one that seems to me to be the most prevalent — the idea that this is a challenge to Obamacare itself.
In reality, the case before the Supreme Court is brought by challengers arguing that the Obama administration’s implementation of Obamacare was inconsistent with the text of the law.
The text of the law says the subsidies were to go to individuals obtaining insurance through an “exchange established by the state,” but a rule released by the Internal Revenue Service subsequently instructed that subsidies could also flow to exchanges set up on behalf of states by the federal government.
Challengers say the law should be enforced as written.
Whether or not one agrees with that simple reading of the text, the reality is that if the justices rule against the administration, they will not be “striking down the law” or “overturning Obamacare.”
Instead, they’d merely be ruling that the administration wasn’t following Obamacare as written.
This is unlike the previous challenge to Obamacare, a case in which challengers were seeking to overturn the law on the basis that its individual mandate exceeded the power of Congress and could not be detached from the rest of the statute.
The case now before the court is not making a constitutional claim that Congress doesn’t have the power to pass federal exchange subsidies, but merely that the statute they wrote did not authorize such subsidies.
