WOOT! Supreme Court Upholds Affordable Care Act Subsidies

AMAZING NEWS! Reuters: "U.S. Supreme Court upholds key Obamacare insurance subsidies."

The U.S. Supreme Court handed President Barack Obama a major victory on Thursday by upholding tax subsidies crucial to his signature healthcare law, with Chief Justice John Roberts saying Congress clearly intended for them to be available in all 50 states.

The court ruled on a 6-3 vote that the 2010 Affordable Care Act, widely known as Obamacare, did not restrict the subsidies to states that establish their own online healthcare exchanges. It marked the second time in three years that the high court ruled against a major challenge to the law brought by conservatives seeking to gut it.

"Congress passed the Affordable Care Act to improve health insurance markets, not to destroy them," Roberts wrote in the court's decision, adding that nationwide availability of the credits is required to "avoid the type of calamitous result that Congress plainly meant to avoid."

Roberts was joined by fellow conservative Justice Anthony Kennedy and the court’s four liberal members in the majority.

...The decision means the subsidies will remain not just in the 13 states that have set up their own exchanges and the three states that have state-federal hybrid exchanges, but also in the 34 states that use the exchange run by the federal government.

...The question before the justices was whether a four-word phrase in the expansive law saying subsidies are available to those buying insurance on exchanges "established by the state" has been correctly interpreted by the administration to allow subsidies to be available nationwide

Roberts wrote that although the conservative challengers' arguments about the plain meaning of the statute were "strong," the "context and structure of the act compel us to depart from what would otherwise be the most natural reading of the pertinent statutory phrase."

YES!

Naturally, Scalia wrote the dissent, and WHO CARES. More than 6 million people who now have subsidized health insurance through Obamacare on the federal exchange will retain their coverage with federal subsidies.

One of the possible consequences of this decision is that more states will revert services back to the federal exchange. Currently, 34 states are already using healthcare.gov.

Now: On to socialized healthcare, so that the 26 million people who still lack health insurance can have meaningful access to healthcare, too!