WASHINGTON — Senate Finance Chair Orrin Hatch (R-UT) said Monday that he will unveil contingency plans for Obamacare if the Supreme Court invalidates premium tax credits in some three-dozen states this summer.
“In the coming days I will release details on a short-term solution for those Americans that may be affected by the decision in King [v. Burwell], should it go the way I think it should go. That solution will address immediate concerns and set the stage for a more permanent fix in the future,” he said in a speech at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research and advocacy group.
Oral arguments in the case are March 4, and the justices will meet privately on March 6 to cast their votes. Time is short, and Republicans feel the need to convey to Chief Justice John Roberts that they’ll be ready to act if the Court guts the subsidies, which could harm millions of Americans financially and shock the health care system.
Hatch didn’t offer specifics. The larger question will be whether the GOP can coalesce around his plan.
It won’t be an easy task. Republicans for years have struggled to rally around an alternative to Obamacare. Hatch suggested that the party won’t be able to enact its health care solutions until the country elects a GOP president.
A contingency plan? Here’s a simple one: A bill that will strike the language in the law that is at issue and declare that the federal exchanges will be treated as state exchanges for the purpose of giving out subsidies. Problem solved.
Except this isn’t really about saving insurance for millions of Americans, it’s about an eleventh hour attempt at convincing Roberts that he won’t be robbing those millions of their insurance if he rules against the subsidies.
We have a private faith based voucher thingy. yeah.
Exactly, you don’t need a new plan, just rewrite the law so that it says explicitly, everywhere, what everyone decided it meant for five years: that all exchanges qualify for subsidies.
But this “contingency plan comin’ real soon now” schtick is garbage. All the yappin’ about ‘repeal and replace’ has given us hundreds of votes to repeal and zero to replace. Not to mention, Hatch can put any old thing he wants out there, but can he convince 15 other baggers not to filibuster? Can he convince enough House R’s to vote for it?
The obvious ‘contingency plan’ doesn’t require any time to figure out, but the one he has in mind amounts to wholesale replacement of Obamacare, which they haven’t done in five years and won’t do. And if the SCOTUS scuttles Ocare, watch them turn their hypocrisy amplifiers to 11 and blame Democrats for that.
The answer is “no” and “no”. But they will find a way to blame Obama for their inability to do anything in Congress.