Tomblin: Morrisey has facts wrong in Supreme Court ACA brief
Charleston Gazette
Tomblin: Morrisey has facts wrong in Supreme Court ACA brief
by David Gutman, Staff writer
West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to take away the federal subsidies that about 30,000 West Virginians receive to buy health coverage on the insurance exchange set up by the Affordable Care Act.
But Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin, who made the decisions about that exchange in West Virginia, says Morrisey has the facts wrong regarding how it was set up.
Morrisey, in a brief to the court filed with five other Republican state attorneys general, says that when state officials, like Tomblin, chose to let the federal government help set up their insurance exchanges, they knew they could be forgoing millions of dollars in subsidies for state residents. That’s not true, Tomblin says, and documents and reports from the time support his case.
On Wednesday, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in King v. Burwell, a lawsuit that argues that subsidies to help people buy private insurance under President Obama’s health-care law should be available only to citizens who live in states that established their own health insurance exchange.
The lawsuit hinges on one sentence of the 955-page law. That provision, in section 36B, limits subsidies to people who purchased insurance “through an exchange established by the State.” In states that do not establish an exchange, the law tells the federal government to set up exchanges instead (37 states use at least a partially federal exchange). The lawsuit argues that, because those exchanges were not “established by the State,” people in those states should not get subsidized insurance.
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http://www.wvgazette.com/article/20150301/GZ01/150309967