Reuters reports that the US Supreme Court has ruled 6 - 3 in favor of the nationwide availability of tax subsidies that are crucial to the implementation of President Barack Obama's signature healthcare law, handing a major victory to the President. It marked the second time in three years that the high court ruled against a major challenge to the law brought by conservatives seeking to gut it. "Congress passed the Affordable Care Act to improve health insurance markets, not to destroy them," wrote Chief Justice Roberts, who added that nationwide availability of the credits is required to "avoid the type of calamitous result that Congress plainly meant to avoid." The ruling will come as a major relief to Obama as he seeks to ensure that his legacy legislative achievement is implemented effectively and survives political and legal attacks before he leaves office in January 2017.
Justice Antonin Scalia took the relatively rare step of reading a summary of his dissenting opinion from the bench. "We really should start calling the law SCOTUScare," said Scalia, referencing the court's earlier decision upholding the constitutionality of the law (SCOTUS is the acronym for the Supreme Court of the United States).
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bob_super on Thursday June 25 2015, @06:37PM
He had to give up on single payer because his own guys wouldn't have dared vote for the evil socialist policy which is providing all other developed countries with healthcare at half our cost.
(Score: 2, Informative) by enigma32 on Thursday June 25 2015, @06:53PM
The other countries that do it at "half our cost" also regulate the costs of the healthcare itself.
One of the best examples is typically Taiwan, with which I have some first-hand experience: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_Taiwan [wikipedia.org]
Go read about it.
The thing that makes the ACA so terrible is that it forces us all to pay for overpriced healthcare, rather than fixing the underlying problem.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Thursday June 25 2015, @10:50PM
How would the underlying problem be fixed efficiently?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2015, @07:00PM
That's not what he said. He said that the ACA was never planned to eventually lead to single payer in the first place. This is just something he himself admitted.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 26 2015, @08:00PM
Source?