Wow. What a way to end a week.
The U.S. Supreme Court announced this afternoon that it will hear a challenge to a core aspect of ObamaCare, the availability of taxpayer subsidies to offset costs of health coverage in states such as Georgia that refused to set up insurance exchanges of their own.
What defenders of the law claim was a mere drafting error, opponents see as a fatal flaw to bring down the entire structure of the program. In other words, the decision to take the case may end up dwarfing this week's midterm results in terms of importance and drama.
With a ruling that the subsidies are illegal, the Roberts court would gut ObamaCare and establish itself beyond much doubt as an activist, politically partisan institution. It would throw the nation's entire health-care system into chaos and force an already dysfunctional Congress to try to put the shattered pieces back together. State legislatures would be forced to decide whether to set up their own exchanges or allow hundreds of thousands of their citizens to lose the subsidies that make their policies affordable, and I don't have much doubt which way Georgia would go on that question. All in all, the brutally confrontational death spiral into which the American political system has been sinking for several years would accelerate considerably.
It would be utter madness, and the odds of that utter madness occurring just jumped substantially. Arguments on King v. Burwell are scheduled for March.
Other than that, have a good weekend everybody.
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