It's been written that one thing that the courts consider when deciding a case like this is the original intent of the bill's author. This could prove very problematic depending on how much weight is given to that aspect.
Jonathan Gruber via a youtube video uploaded on 01/10/2012 in a speech given at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco wrote:"by not setting up an exchange, the politicians of a state are costing state residents hundreds and millions and billions of dollars....That is really the ultimate threat, is, will people understand that, gee, if your governor doesn't set up an exchange, you're losing hundreds of millions of dollars of tax credits to be delivered to your citizens."
Then:
Jonathan Gruber via a youtube video uploaded on 01/20/2012 wrote:What’s important to remember politically about this is if you're a state and you don’t set up an exchange, that means your citizens don't get their tax credits—but your citizens still pay the taxes that support this bill. So you’re essentially saying [to] your citizens you’re going to pay all the taxes to help all the other states in the country. I hope that that's a blatant enough political reality that states will get their act together and realize there are billions of dollars at stake here in setting up these exchanges. But, you know, once again the politics can get ugly around this.
So who is this Jonathan Gruber?
wikipedia wrote:Jonathan Holmes Gruber is a professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he has taught since 1992. He is also the director of the Health Care Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research, where he is a research associate. He is an associate editor of both the Journal of Public Economics and the Journal of Health Economics. In 2009 he was elected to the Executive Committee of the American Economic Association.
From Amazon.com regarding [i wrote:Health Care Reform: What It Is, Why It's Necessary, How It Works[/i]]About the Author
Dr. Jonathan Gruber is a professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and director of the Health Care Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He was a key architect of Massachusetts’s ambitious health reform effort and consulted extensively with the Obama administration and Congress during the development of the Affordable Care Act. The Washington Post called him “possibly the [Democratic] party’s most influential health-care expert.”
In addition, he is widely credited in news reports as one of the key drafters of the ACA.
Now it seems that Gruber will tell anyone would will listen that he made a mistake and that it was not the intent of the law to withhold the subsidies from those who got their coverage from the federal exchange. But, if one looks at the first quote he is very succinct about the laws intent.
So reading between the lines, what does this really mean?
Could it be that the actual intent of the law was to bully states into setting up exchanges because if they didn't then their citizens would not get the tax credits? Now that only about 30-31 (edit: Currently there are only 15 state run exchanges) states actually set up the exchanges it seems the Obama administration is ducking for cover so as not to have to take the blame for a law that it pushed down our throats as nancy pelosi said: "But we have to pass the [health care ] bill so that you can find out what is in it." Perhaps
they should have read the law before
they passed it!
You spin me round.....
