Human sacrifice FTW
by digby
If anyone was under the mistaken impression that the Republicans planned to “fix” the Affordable Care Act if the Supremes decide that a typo invalidates the subsidies in the federal exchange, Paul Ryan just set them straight:
Ryan: If King wins “the idea is not to make Obamacare work better” — it’s to give states more freedom “to get out of Obamacare.”
— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) February 13, 2015
I don’t know if he helped his cause with that comment. The Supreme watchers all think the conservative majority will be less likely to strike down the federal exchange subsidies if it’s clear that the congress has no intention of doing something for all the people who would suddenly be hit with massive insurance premiums. Most people thought the idea was for the congress to at least pretend they might fix it in order to give the Court enough cover to say that they didn’t intend to throw millions of people’s lives into chaos because they assumed the congress would do its job.
It does not appear that congress is going to play along with that which either means they secretly want the court to uphold the law or they really want to throw millions of people’s lives into chaos. I think they might believe they win either way — they can blame the court and run on repeal for decades into the future or they can blame all the suffering on the inept Democrats who created a bad system. I’m not sure either will work for them politically but I’m fairly sure they’ll commit themselves to either one without giving a second thought to the actual suffering of millions of people. They think it will be worth the sacrifice. Someone else’s sacrifice, of course.