King v. Burwell; Can’t Quite Let It Go!

February 20, 2015

The Supreme Court will hear from counsel for the parties in King v. Burwell on March 4, a week from Wednesday. I have some thoughts. I want to start by sharing the issue, as the Court formulated it:

Whether the Internal Revenue Service may permissibly promulgate regulations to extend tax-credit subsidies to coverage purchased through exchanges established by the federal government under Section 1321 of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

Note what issues are not before the Court:  Obamacare is bad; Obamacare costs me money; But freedom; etc. If process matters, the narrow question before the Court involves the right of the IRS, as the agency charged with administering the subsidies, to interpret the statute as it

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Obamacare News

January 29, 2015

Rich! Just really rich! That’s my reaction to House GOP Demands To Know What Obama Will Do If SCOTUS Guts Obamacare, posted at TalkingPointsMemo on January 28 and written by Sahil Kapur.

The issue is King v. Burwell, No. 14-114, the Supreme Court case to be argued on March 4. The plaintiffs claim subsidies cannot be provided to insureds in states without their own exchanges. Most of these states—which rely on the federal exchange—are red states, controlled by Republican governors and legislatures. (For more on the issues, read King v. Burwell: The Affordable Care Act and the Supreme Court Meet Again from MRW, posted in November 2014.)

Mr. Kapur focuses on a January 28 letter from five House

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Obamacare, Yet Again

January 8, 2015

Steve Brill is a journalist/businessman/attorney. He created American Lawyer (a magazine), Court TV, and several other publications. I have been following Mr. Brill since he created American Lawyer in 1979. It was an industry publication and really exposed BigLaw—the world of major law firms—to the rest of us. (My partners and I bump up against BigLaw routinely, but that world is very different from ours.)

Mr. Brill wrote Bitter Pill:  Why Medical Bills are Killing Us for Time magazine in February 2013. His book, America’s Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System was published this past Monday. Here’s Malcolm Gladwell’s review, The Bill, from the just out January 12 issue

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