I say yes, you say no, OR People are Strange

The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, in Virginia just found the opposite. It upheld the subsidies.

full blow legal ruling

Edited to add: I named the link that because it is the legal ruling with all the legalese, which is a pain to wade through

Quinn,

I forgot to say how adorable Quinn's new brother is ... he looks so soft and cuddly.  How old will he be when you get him in August?

hugs,

Bren

Biggest bunch of hypocrites ever.  Glad that the masses still have their insurance for now.  Seems to me the GOP and company go more  mind-numbingly egregious daily.  I'm hoping come election time it will be the biggest back-fire ever for them.  So few seem to grasp the true depths of what seems like grave destruction.  They are un-real.

Jackie

Can you imagine how those people will vote that had good health insurance through the federal exchange only to have it taken away?  And they're all from those Red States with Republican Governors.

Bren, the breeder and I are meeting 1/2 way on the Interstate.  Nine hours in the car for all of us.  He will be almost 14 weeks old, but already neutered.  I got Quinn at 16 weeks old and I thought he was tiny.  I waited til he was 6 months old before neutering.  Breeders do it all different, I guess.  I've got 4 days to introduce my 3 cats before I have out of town company.  Considering my feral Rescue is afraid of everyone and I only have so many rooms to put people and cats in, I hope we are all integrated by the 17th

Blue, so glad you put in that link.  I've been doing about three hours of computer clean-up work ( several more to go actually ) and just noticed that piece on the way here.  I have to be honest and say...I'm not too disappointed in the results of the turn-out.  Seems like some of these "characters" get all excited with the chance to LAY it on thick and get their "fame" quotient for the week.  When will these jerks realize they are on the losing end  and it isn't going to get much better.  Hope he enjoyed the just desserts he asked for.  Hope none of that bunch are poker players....they are not too good with the math.

Jackie

What are we to make of the conflicting rulings, issued Tuesday by two federal courts, on an important part of the Affordable Care Act—taxpayer-financed subsidies for people buying insurance through the online federal exchange? My initial reading is that the rulings won’t amount to very much. If the Republicans truly want to put an end to Obamacare, they are going to have to do it through the ballot box and the Congress. The courts aren’t going to do it for them.

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit has ruled that the 2010 health-care-reform law authorized the provision of subsidies to people who buy insurance through state-run exchanges, such as Covered California and NY State of Health. But, citing the precise text of the law, the D.C. court maintains that the same authority was never extended to Healthcare.gov, which the federal government runs, and which covers thirty-six states that have refused to set up their own health-care exchanges. The ruling won’t go into effect immediately; in the first instance, the Justice Department is appealing to the full Court of Appeals. But if those judges and other courts were to uphold this ruling, it would clearly undermine the main goal of Obamacare, which was to reduce the number of uninsured Americans.

Cue a barrage of alarmist headlines and a vigorous denunciation of the ruling by Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, who said, "You don’t need a fancy legal degree to understand that Congress intended for every eligible American to have access to tax credits that would lower their health-care costs, regardless of whether it was state officials or federal officials who were running the marketplace." 

That admonition from Earnest came shortly before a second appeals-court panel, this one based at the Fourth Circuit, in Richmond, issued a ruling pointing in the opposite direction. Citing an ambiguity in the law’s wording, the court said it would defer to the Obama Administration—which, after all, pushed the law through. The Administration, through the Internal Revenue Service, had issued a rule authorizing the payment of subsidies for policies purchased on Healthcare.gov. This rule was "a permissible exercise of the agency’s discretion," the Richmond judges said. 

The duelling court decisions have opened the way for a lengthy legal battle that could conceivably go all the way to the Supreme Court. And they will undoubtedly provide some encouragement to Republicans and conservative activists who are still fighting the A.C.A. in local courts around the country. Ultimately, though, it seems highly likely that the D.C. ruling will be overturned. In the interim, with the subsidies still in place, more and more people will sign up for health coverage through the exchanges—which, according to a recent survey by the Commonwealth Fund, are already having notable success in getting more people insured. 

On what basis, other than wishful thinking, do I reach this judgment? It’s largely a matter of history, and of the internal logic of Obamacare. As with its precursors (reforms proposed by the Heritage Foundation, in 1989; the Massachusetts Romneycare program, in 2006), the provision of generous subsidies, financed by taxpayers, for the purchase of private coverage is a central tenet of the law—perhaps the central tenet. It is the subsidies that make private coverage affordable for the uninsured. It is the subsidies that persuaded the insurance industry to support the reform. And it is the subsidies that make Obamacare a liberal, redistributionary program. Without the subsidies, Obamacare isn’t Obamacare. 

All of this was perfectly clear in March, 2010, when President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act. During the long and tortuous debates leading up to that moment, there were arguments about many, many things that the new law contained. As far as I am aware, though, nobody on either side of the political divide suggested that it was designed to provide subsidies through the state exchanges but not the federal one. Other journalists who followed the legislation more closely than I did agree with this assessment. "Not once in the 16 months I reported on the formal congressional debate did any of the law’s architects suggest they were thinking along these lines," Jonathan Cohn, of The New Republic, wrote last week in an enlightening post about the upcoming rulings. 

The lawsuits that produced today’s rulings didn’t come about by accident. In Cohn’s words, they were "the brainchild" of Michael Cannon, a health-policy wonk at the conservative Cato Institute, and Jonathan Adler, a conservative law professor at Case Western University, who focussed attention on the technical language in the law, which certainly wasn’t as clear as it could have been. In the two members of the D.C. Court of Appeals who struck down the subsidies attached to policies sold through Healthcare.gov, Cannon and Adler found a couple of jurists who accepted their tendentious arguments. But even Judge Thomas Griffith, who wrote the opinion for the court, said, "We reach this conclusion, frankly, with reluctance."

The Richmond court, in explicitly acknowledging the ambiguity in the language of the A.C.A. and deferring to the Administration’s interpretation of it, hewed to precedent and agreed with Judge Harry T. Edwards, the dissenter in the D.C. case. Describing the lawsuit underlying the case as "a not-so-veiled attempt to gut the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act," Edwards concluded his written opinion by noting that the court’s ruling "defies the will of Congress and the permissible interpretations of the agencies to whom Congress has delegated the authority to interpret and enforce the terms of the ACA." 

That sounds about right. If the D.C. case ever makes it as far as the Supreme Court, I reckon Edwards’s view, and not the majority opinion, will be the prevailing one, at least as long as Chief Justice John Roberts is running the show. 

Here, to be sure, I am relying on precedent rather than textual analysis. In June, 2012, you will recall, the high court, in a five-to-four decision, ruled constitutional the A.C.A. provision mandating that individuals purchase insurance, on the grounds that the mandate was a tax, which Congress has the right to impose. As many commentators, myself included, remarked at the time, this innovative and largely unexpected maneuver looked like a political one. In the power to tax, Roberts, who wrote the majority opinion, found a way to avoid unleashing the enormous political storm that would doubtless have followed the Court’s decision to overturn President Obama’s signature reform, one he had campaigned on in 2008, and which took more than two years of haggling and debate to become law. Two years on—considerably more by the time this case would reach the Supremes—I very much doubt that the Chief Justice will have discovered the urge to strike down the Affordable Care Act.

This is from The New Yorker.  While editing the, author's name got erased.   I tend to agree with the writer mainly due to the fact that a lengthy time period needed for it to get all the way up to the Supreme Court will see many more people on ACA ( there is good feelings about it coming from quite a few Republicans now as well )  and though there is always room for surprise as we just saw with Hobby Lobby, I'm still thinking ( maybe for the backlash it has caused and is still causing ) that much will be considered.  I just don't see this  ( the SCOTUS had an earlier favorable ruling ) being scrapped at the late date it makes it through the court processes.

Jackie  

Hi Gals,

Been a busy day for me ... got a lot of mowing done and washed the car.  My Maggie has been sick the last three days.  She's about 14 now and I'm afraid she's going to leave me soon.  She's had diarrhea for 3 days in the house and isn't eating much.  Mags has never had an accident in the house before now.  She still wants to go on our walks though.  If she doesn't improve in a few days, I'll have to take her to the vet. It will just be me and Tank when Maggie goes.  I've never had just one dog before ... always had at least two and sometimes up to four.  I think Tank is about five now and he will be our last dog.

Lassie ... It truly boggles the mind doesn't it.

Jackie ... Enjoyed reading the Margaret and Helen article.  I wonder if Perry has had a chance to use his machine gun today.  Maybe he'll accidentally shoot himself in the foot.

hugs,

Bren

I guess I'm a little mean.....I think what happened to Nugent in this instance http://www.addictinginfo.org/2014/07/23/ted-nugent-native-americans-are-unclean-vermin-who-dont-qualify-as-people/  should happen to every performance he has lined up.  Interesting epithet he picked out.....it fits HIM so well.  He is a fine example of everything you don't want to be. 

Jackie

Bren, I hope Maggie gets better. I don't know how usual this recommendation is but when our dogs had diarrhea the vet had us feed them raw ground lamb and cooked rice mixed together. Check with your vet before trying this though, like I said, I don't know if that's a usual recommendation.

I just remembered - the vet first said raw lamb and rice, then said with the price of lamb we could try hamburger and rice and that would probably work, and it did. This was back when in our area it was impossible to get lamb other than in the Spring without paying an arm and a leg. We can get lamb year-round now so I had forgotten about this. But there seems to be more bacteria in meat these days so any kind of raw meat might not be a good idea.

Conservatives  are, by their very nature, fearful.  They're mostly fearful of the future, and try their darnedest to preserve (conserve) the past and the present.  Couple that innate need with religious fundamentalism and the fear becomes truly pathological.  

I saw a cartoon the other day with 2 panels:  one panel showed a "religious" dad warning his son that if he sinned, everyone would hate him, God would hate him especially and he would end up in the fires of hell.

The other panel, featuring a secular dad, was saying to his son -- be kind to others, always.