If you think Obamacare is a disaster now, just wait until the courts enforce the law as it was actually written. On Wednesday, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on the case of King v. Burwell, the appeal of a decision that allows the IRS to implement health care subsidies in states that did not set up insurance exchanges.
The issue at hand: There is no language in the president’s health care law that specifically empowers the IRS to implement those taxes and subsidized premiums in states that did not set up their own exchanges. In fact, they intentionally left that language out in order to incentivize states to participate in Obamacare.
The real intention behind the “special subsidies” is to lower the perceived costs of Obamacare coverage. In other words, the IRS is lying to the American people about the true cost of government-run health care.
I guess in the Obama White House, if you like your health care law, you can keep it. If you don’t, just have the IRS enforce something different and hope nobody will notice.
According to the Cato Institute, if the Supreme Court rules to enforce the president’s health care law to the letter, “some 4 million Americans will lose the illegal health-insurance subsidies that have been shielding them from the full cost” of the Affordable Care Act. Lower-income families could see tax increases of up to $5,000, along with premium increases of an average of 300 percent.
These are the real costs of Obamacare. The full financial picture would have been good to know while people were “shopping around” for the plans they were forced by the individual mandate to purchase anyway.
To be clear, the potential cost increases would not be a result of the King v. Burwell decision. They would be a result of the IRS actually following the health care law as it is written. If Congress did not like the law the way it was written, they should not have passed it. It’s that simple.
The Supreme Court has a constitutional obligation to rule in favor of the plaintiff in June, and eliminate the illegal subsidies and taxes in those states in question.
[SEE: Congress Cartoons]
Forcing the IRS to fully follow the laws of the United States is not extreme. What’s really extreme is that the IRS has been enforcing a version of Obamacare that doesn’t exist. If the Supreme Court allows the IRS to continue hiding the bad outcomes of Obamacare for political coverage, it would set a dangerous precedent that agenda-driven agencies can enforce whatever laws they want.
The effort to enforce our system of checks and balances won’t end at the Supreme Court. If the court rules in favor of the plaintiff, there is no doubt the president will then call on Congress to sign the taxes and subsidies into actual law, continuing business as usual.
The government has a responsibility to clean up the mess it has made, but Congress cannot enable the president’s lawlessness. Passing legislation that preserves these taxes and subsidies would send a troubling message to the White House that it’s okay to illegally legislate from the executive branch, because Congress will green light his actions after the fact. The precedent set by that executive abuse of power would come back to haunt Americans for generations to come.
The Supreme Court and Congress have an obligation to protect the Constitution and preserve the system of checks and balances that makes America exceptional.
Also, for what it’s worth, having Congress actually read the law rather than “passing the bill to find out what’s in it” would probably be helpful to avoid situations like this in the future.
No comments:
Post a Comment