Halbig v Sibelius is a case that challenges this administration's cavalier attitude to the law. The law specifies that only people signing up on state exchanges are eligible for subsidies. HHS simply rewrote the law to include those who signed up on Healthcare.gov, the federal website. That is nowhere part of the law. Here is the incomparable staff of the Journal describing this affront to the rule of law. And 10 to 1 the first 3 lib posters will never read the article.
ObamaCare's Latest Legal Challenge - WSJ.com
Much more at the source.
ObamaCare's Latest Legal Challenge - WSJ.com
The Affordable Care Actat least the version that passed in 2010instructed the states to establish insurance exchanges, and if they didn't the Health and Human Services Department was authorized to build federal exchanges. The law says that subsidies will be available only to people who enroll "through an Exchange established by the State." The question in Halbig is whether these taxpayer subsidies can be distributed through the federal exchanges, as the Administration insists.
Prior to passage, Democrats were divided over the structure of the exchanges, with liberals favoring a national clearinghouse and moderates state control. The federalists won and conditioned the subsidies on state-based exchanges.
This was no accident. The federal government cannot commandeer the sovereign states under the Constitution, so Democrats created an incentive for Governors to participate voluntarily. If they didn't cooperate by taking the quid of the exchanges, they would deny their constituents the quo of eligibility to claim billions of dollars worth of benefits. The other Democratic goal was to have the states share in the workload of implementation, instead of concentrating everything within HHS.
But also prior to passage, Democrats were convinced that the ObamaCare opposition would melt away as Americans learned to love the law. That did not happen. Some 34 states opted out, and two others couldn't meet all the HHS mandates by deadline. So the Administration faced a choice: HHS could either obey the law, deny subsidies to the two-thirds of the U.S. population living in states with federal exchanges and thus greatly diminish Mr. Obama's legacy project. Or it could improvise a workaroundwhich is what it did.
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In 2012, HHS and the Internal Revenue Service arrogated to themselves the power to rewrite the law and published a regulation simply decreeing that subsidies would be available through the federal exchanges too. The IRS devoted only a single paragraph to its deviation from the statute, even though the "established by a State" language appears nine times in the law's text. The rule claims that an exchange established on behalf of a state is a "federally established state-established exchange," as if HHS is the 51st state.
Careful spadework into ObamaCare's legislative history by Case Western Reserve law professor Jonathan Adler and Michael Cannon of the Cato Institute has demonstrated that this jackalope rule-making was contrary to Congress's intent. For example, the bill appropriated a mere $304 million for HHS to run exchanges. The actual cost turned out to be $3.3 billion as state after state dropped out.
Much more at the source.