Believe it or not, there is some actual good news concerning the Affordable Care Act (aka Obama-care) in Virginia. With the most recent enrollment period now ended, it turns out that the number of residents signing up for health insurance on the federal exchange has far exceeded expectations, with around 385,000 Virginians taking advantage of the program. This represents a huge increase over last year, when approximately 216,000 Virginians signed up.
What makes this success even more amazing is that the Affordable Care Act (ACA) has been vilified non-stop by many of Virginia’s top Republican politicians, and one of the law’s major provisions—the expansion of Medicaid to cover a larger percentage of the poorest and neediest individuals—remains unimplemented by the GOP-controlled General Assembly.
But don’t hold your breath waiting for the Old Dominion’s Republicans to trumpet this remarkable success. The party has been trying to defeat the ACA from the second that it was introduced by President Obama, and while the GOP couldn’t stop it from becoming law, Republicans have done everything they possibly can to screw up its implementation. And now, with a major challenge to Obamacare currently being heard by the Supreme Court, there is a very real possibility that the law will be crippled in such a way that it will essentially cease to function.
The basis of the latest challenge is an inelegantly worded section of the law that explains how people who sign up for insurance should receive subsidies. These subsidies are crucial, as without them many people would be unable to afford even the cheapest plans. When congress wrote the law, it was assumed that most states would set up their own online exchanges, and that the federal ACA exchange would play a minor role. As it turned out, a majority of states—including Virginia—have relied on the federal exchange, and the current anti-Obamacare plaintiffs are insisting that the law does not allow people who receive insurance through the federal exchange to receive subsidies.
This is a willfully obtuse reading of the law, and blatantly at odds with what the drafters of the law intended. But there is a not-insignificant chance that the Supreme Court’s conservative majority will actually accept this argument, and in doing so make insurance unaffordable for hundreds of thousands of Americans.
And if that happens, the responsibility for Obamacare’s demise will rest squarely on the shoulders of the four Virginians at the heart of the lawsuit. These four individuals—David King, Rose Luck, Brenda Levy and Douglas Hurst—were recruited by a lawyer associated with the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a libertarian group that has long sought to destroy the ACA.
At this point, it seems that the Obama administration’s best hope is for the case to be thrown out for lack of standing. While the legal argument is complex, the plaintiffs are basically asserting that, based on their individual incomes, they wouldn’t have to buy insurance under the law if the subsidies didn’t exist. As it turns out, this doesn’t actually seem to be true for three out of the four. In addition, both Douglas Hurst and lead plaintiff David King have served in the military, and thus may qualify for free VA insurance coverage.
But if the Supreme Court looks past these obvious problems and allows the case to proceed, Virginia’s rabidly anti-Obama-care Republicans might finally get exactly what they’ve been hoping for. And then, like a dog who catches that car he’s been chasing, they’ll have to figure out exactly what to do next.