You mean like they didn’t want to state that it was a tax on people who had insurance plans, or they didn’t want the CBO to score it as taxes, or they didn’t come out and say that the limited attention and economic understanding of the American voter was critical to passing the law? Because the optics are terrible.
a lot of which was screamed and bitched and moaned about. probably millions of lawyers and legislators and reporters and experts were looking at this bill. none of them seemed to think federal exchanges were going to lose subsidies. given how much coverage death panels got, you’d think “revoking tax credits” and “insurance markets held hostage” would have been given some airtime as well. again, when the lawsuit came out, there was a collective confused, “what?” at every level involved: congress, staffers, governors, state legislatures, bureaucrats. no one thought subsidies were going away.
Gruber has every reason to lie about what he said now; he certainly didn’t then.
so we are setting a baseline that “then” (in jan 2012) gruber had no reason to hide his threats. in his book published dec 2011, he lists the cadillac tax, small business requirements, the mandate, and the x% income or $300 lost in penalties (and increasing in later years) but he does not list anything about denying tax credits to federal exchanges. the core tenet of the reform was the mandate, offset with tax credits, and exchanges like in the romneycare model to expand the number insured, not reduce it.
the debate and law design happened 2008 and onwards. it was law by the “then” of 2012. his stat models always had federal subsidies in there. there are none showing gop states markets collapsing due to the federal run exchanges being there and not getting subsidies.
not only does gruber need to be made a liar, but multiple congressmen, staffers, reporters, and republicans who hate obamacare have to be liars as well.
you need to make a new timeline to support your theory.
It could be that they realized that Obamacare wasn’t going to be as popular as they thought, that it wouldn’t be the cudgel which they thought it was, and then needed the federal subsidies to make their plan work.
no it couldn’t. the staffers drafting the law always assumed the federal subsidies were there. always. there’s no reputable legislative source saying it was understood that federal exchanges would not receive tax credits. do you have any governors or civil servants or people drafting the law saying otherwise?
“It was always intended that the federal fallback exchange would do everything that the statute told the states to do, which includes delivering the subsidies,” says Chris Condeluci, who worked as tax and benefits counsel for the Senate Finance Committee Republicans during the Affordable Care Act debate.
“The evidence of Congressional intent here is overwhelming,” John McDonough, who worked on the Health, Education, Labor and Pension committee during the health reform debate, wrote in an email. “There is not a scintilla of evidence that the Democratic lawmakers who designed the law intended to deny subsidies to any state, regardless of exchange status.”
“The clear intent of the tax credits is to make insurance more affordable, especially when you’re mandating its purchase,” says Topher Spiro, who worked as deputy staff director for health policy for the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions. “It’s crazy to think of a mandate without subsidies. It just doesn’t make any sense.”
take a look at the provisions listed below:
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2014/07/22/3459165/halbig/
-An amendment to the Affordable Care Act requires the federally-run exchanges to report various information that they would only be able to report if they were providing subsidies, such as whether taxpayers received an “advance payment of such credit”; information needed to determine individuals’ “eligibility for, and the amount of, such credit”; and “[i]nformation necessary to determine whether a taxpayer has received excess advance payments.” Congress would not have imposed this reporting requirements if they thought that the federal exchanges would not offer subsidies.
-The Affordable Care Act also provides that the only people who are qualified to purchase insurance at all on a federally-run exchange are people who “reside[] in the State that established the Exchange.” Thus, if federally-run exchanges are not deemed to be “established by the State,” that means that no one at all is allowed to purchase health insurance on the federally-run exchanges, and there would be no purpose whatsoever to their existence. As the trial court explained in this very case, this interpretation makes no sense, because “courts presume that Congress has used its scarce legislative time to enact statutes that have some legal consequence.”
they were totally expecting subsidies.
either it was a typo, or there was a giant doomsday threat against the gop states that no one noticed for almost half a decade and wound up never being used or remembered by anyone. i know democrats are shitty at making threats but they can do better than “established by the state.”
again, was there any reasonable piece by a reputable law expert(aside from a couple certain gop appointed judges) that said the plaintiff’s had any kind of case given the evidence? i mean, i put actual money on the line and bought some healthcare sector stock the day before because of the preponderance of evidence. (the bucket i bought only went up 3% :/ )
