New Lawsuit Against Obamacare
Sam Kazman and Michael Carvin have a great Forbes op-ed about their new Obamacare lawsuit, which could invalidate key portions of the law in the 33 states that did not set-up state-based health-insurance exchanges. Essentially, the lawsuit alleges that the IRS illegally rewrote the Affordable Care Act so that both the employer mandate and accompanying government subsidies applied in the 33 states that lack their own health-insurance exchanges:
In more than half the country, the implementation of ObamaCare has been premised on a patently illegal regulation—a lawless “quick fix” designed by the Administration to circumvent the fact that roughly two-thirds of the states have effectively chosen to “opt out” of the Affordable Care Act’s intrusive mandates. A new lawsuit, recently filed by us in federal district court in D.C., will expose that flaw in ObamaCare’s very foundation, vindicating the right of these “refusenik” states to shield their citizens from an overreaching federal government. Specifically, although the Act’s plain language makes clear that a State’s citizens may receive subsidies and a State’s employers are required to offer health insurance if—but only if—the State decides to run the Act’s insurance “Exchange,” a new IRS rule completely rewrites this scheme and purports to make the subsidies and employer mandate applicable even where the State has opted out and the federal government runs the “Exchange.”
