The End of Obamacare Schadenfreude?

Apparently words mean whatever Chief Justice Roberts thinks they mean:

Roberts writes.

Subsidies are available!

Big sigh of relief.

Chaos avoided.

"This means that individuals who get their health insurance through an exchange established by the federal government will be eligible for tax subsidies."

The government wins. The Chief is joined by Kennedy, Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan. Scalia has a dissenting opinion.

Justice Scalia dissents, joined by Justices Thomas and Alito. He finds clarity in the key phrase and proclaims: "Words no longer have meaning if an Exchange that is not established by a State is 'established by the State.'" He accuses the majority of "interpretive jiggery-pokery" in pursuit of "the overriding principle": "The Affordable Care Act must be saved."

The Court’s decision reflects the philosophy that judges should endure whatever interpretive distortions it takes in order to correct a supposed flaw in the statutory machinery.... We lack the prerogative to repair laws that do not work out in practice, just as the people lack the ability to throw us out of office if they dislike the solutions we concoct....
It is not our place to judge the quality of the care and deliberation that went into this or any other law. A law enacted by voice vote with no deliberation whatever is fully as binding upon us as one enacted after years of study, months of committee hearings, and weeks of debate. Much less is it our place to make everything come out right when Congress does not do its job properly. It is up to Congress to design its laws with care, and it is up to the people to hold them to account if they fail to carry out that responsibility....

Even Roberts had a little problem with the wording:

Chief Justice Roberts wrote that the words must be understood as part of a larger statutory plan. “In this instance,” he wrote, “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.”

“Congress passed the Affordable Care Act to improve health insurance markets, not to destroy them,” he added. “If at all possible, we must interpret the act in a way that is consistent with the former, and avoids the latter.”

Admitting the law as written would destroy health care as we know it.

So all this old stuff is irrelevant:

Biggest Health Insurers to Get Even Bigger Under Obamacare - Yes, that was their goal when they "helped" the Democrats write the bill.

MIT Economist Jonathan Gruber Had Bigger Role in Health Law, Emails Show - But we already knew that, and that Obama and the Democrats lied about it.



Hey, who cares that they had to lie to get the law passed? All's well that ends well, I suppose.

Republicans Go On Obamacare Offensive: 'A Reckless Law' - Yeah, I'll bet Boehner's gonna be all over that now.