High-stakes clash at high court over health subsidies

Associated Press

WASHINGTON

Insurance coverage for millions of people is riding on the latest politically charged Supreme Court clash over President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul.

The case being argued today focuses on who’s eligible for federal tax subsidies intended to make health coverage affordable. Three years after Chief Justice John Roberts saved Obama’s health law in an epic, election-year fight over its constitutionality, the chief justice again could hold the pivotal vote.

“This case is no less important to the future of the Affordable Care Act” than the court’s decision in 2012, said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California at Irvine law school.

The current challenge devised by die-hard opponents of the law, also known as Obamacare, relies on four words — “established by the state” — in the more than 900-page law to argue that the vast majority of people who now get help paying for their insurance premiums are ineligible for their federal tax credits. That is because roughly three dozen states opted against creating their own health insurance marketplaces, or exchanges, and rely on the federal healthcare.gov to help people find coverage if they don’t get insurance through their jobs or the government.

In the challengers’ view, the phrase “established by the state” demonstrates that subsidies are available only to people in states that set up their own exchanges. Those words cannot refer to exchanges established by the Health and Human Services Department, which oversees healthcare.gov, the opponents argued.