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posted by cmn32480 on Thursday June 25 2015, @04:25PM   Printer-friendly
from the your-tax-dollars-at-work dept.

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).


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  • (Score: 2) by aristarchus on Thursday June 25 2015, @09:33PM

    by aristarchus (2645) on Thursday June 25 2015, @09:33PM (#201233) Journal

    OH, really? Why do you say this? I thought the question of the basic structure was settled in the previous SCOTUS case.

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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Groonch on Friday June 26 2015, @01:56AM

    by Groonch (1759) on Friday June 26 2015, @01:56AM (#201342)

    The fact that the federal government can set up exchanges if the state governments do not is pretty basic to the scheme of the ACA. If you had to explain the ACA on a napkin, this would be on that napkin. Amusingly, Roberts' opinion in this case actually points out that some of the justices in the minority actually acknowledged this as self-evident fact in the 2012 decision. When it became a possible way to gut Obamacare, Scalia, Alito and Thomas suddenly felt very differently about it...

  • (Score: 1) by Groonch on Friday June 26 2015, @02:13AM

    by Groonch (1759) on Friday June 26 2015, @02:13AM (#201351)

    And no, the 2012 case was not about determining the basic structure of the ACA; It was about whether the ACA is constitutional. I don't recall any significant statutory interpretation issues in it.