The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, or That Hastily Passed Piece of Legislation That Used So Many Trees Greenpeace Should’ve Protested, has been, in many respects, a Charlie Foxtrot.
Never mind the whole “we have to pass the bill so you can …”-type flubs, never mind the gross overestimations of the law’s public benefit and its undersold costs, never mind the never-ending politics in its support or its opposition. Its challenges in court, its terrible rollout, and its unilateral manipulation by the very White House that desired it are all reflective of the truth that it is, in the annals of American lawmaking, a monstrosity.
So bizarre is the law that when its central underpinning was questioned as being in violation of the Constitution’s Commerce Clause, it was instead upheld as a tax.
So unwieldy is the law that when it came time to implement it, its website crashed and burned down the administration’s reputation, it faced subsequent enrollment shortfalls, its data were spottily made available to the public, and it was single-handedly — and often sneakily — changed by the executive branch.
So questionable is the law, even now, that individuals still live out its “horror stories,” the ones that the Senate Majority Leader dismissed as falsehoods — there can be “horror stories” under any healthcare regime, but this Obamacare was sold to us as infallible, utopian — liberals doubt its employer mandate, and it still faces tests in court.
As a reflection of how poorly this law was written, its subsidy provision was challenged in a federal appeals panel over semantics. A 2-1 majority in Halbig v. Burwell ruled that tax credits for purchasing health insurance on the federal exchange are invalid, based on the exact letter of the law. “[T]he court reaffirmed the principle that the law is what Congress enacts — the text of the statute itself — and not the unexpressed intentions or hopes of legislators or a bill’s proponents,” The Washington Post’s Jonathan Adler wrote.
A separate appeals court issued a conflicting ruling later that day.
The larger point: Obamacare was a horribly written law.
But oh, Jon Stewart said Wednesday night, it could just be changed with a tweak to the law’s language — “you could salvage this entire f—ing thing with a mediocre Scrabble hand,” as he put it, to make clear that purchasers are eligible for a subsidy whether they are consumers on state exchanges or the federal one.
But wait. House Speaker John Boehner would have the audacity to say no dice; to say that the Halbig ruling is “further proof that President Obama’s health care law is completely unworkable. It cannot be fixed.”
And therefore, we are to blame Boehner.
That’s right, everyone — we are to forget that this law was drafted with the equivalent care of a bunch of liquored up frat boys scribbling on a whiteboard the size of a parking lot; we are to forget that the term “completely unworkable,” while a little hyperbolic, described the law’s troubled rollout and its continued problems pretty well; we are to forget that the law’s challenges in court are representative of how, from day one, Obamacare was destined “to become cumbersome to this world.”
That’s right, everyone — none of that matters. It’s John Boehner’s fault that we just can’t make the law work, as Adler said, in accordance with “the unexpressed intentions or hopes of legislators or a bill’s proponents.”
May Jon Stewart’s viewership not be goldfish in remembering the full breadth of the Affordable Care Act saga. “A mediocre Scrabble hand” is but a flash point in a much larger and difficult game.
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