“If getting rid of Obamacare is such a good idea, why isn’t corporate America getting behind King v. Burwell, the Supreme Court case designed to demolish the Affordable Care Act?”
After listing the groups supporting the plaintiffs in King, the writer notes “not a single business group — not the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, not any of the health industry companies and trade groups that opposed the law when it was being drafted — has presented a brief endorsing this lawsuit.”
An industry being subsidized by a law defends the law, and somehow that industry’s arguments are supposed to carry special weight? Imagine the goldmine of articles Mother Jones could dig up in this vein:
“If cutting defense spending is such a good idea, why is the military-industrial complex opposed?”
“If federal drilling royalties are too low, why does Exxon oppose hiking them?”
“If Too-Big-To-Fail is a problem, why do America’s largest banks oppose Brown-Vitter?
But I shouldn’t just pick on Mother Jones. This is a standard liberal way of defending regulations and subsidies: pointing to the industries that benefit from the policies, and saying, “look, even industry supports this intervention!”
In an editorial, Florida’s Sun-Sentinel defended regulations that protect Realtors and other professionals from competition by pointing out that the protected professionals don’t want these protections to go away.
Seemingly on a hundred occasions, liberals defended the light bulb law by pointing out how even the light bulb industry supported these rules, which pad their profit margins. (See examples from the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler, the Center for American Progress’s Joe Romm and the New York Times’ Gail Collins.
And on climate change legislation, lefties again and again point to support from megacorps like General Electric or Nike as proof that their bill is salutary.
As the King v. Burwell case moves more into the headlines, expect more mainstream and lefty journalists to launch the HCA defense of the ACA.
