Free Republic

The language of the Obamacare legislation is unambiguous: the monthly premiums for such month for 1 or more qualified health plans offered in the individual market within a State which cover the taxpayer, the taxpayer’s spouse, or any dependent (as defined in section 152) of the taxpayer and which were enrolled in through an Exchange established by the State under 1311 [1] of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act This language clearly and concisely provides that the Obama administration did not and does not have the right to provide subsidies to individuals enrolled in states that did not organize...

Sens. Ted Cruz (Texas) and Rand Paul (Ky.) are trying to avoid an ethanol landmine in Iowa. Both Republican senators have criticized federal subsidies for ethanol, which are popular in Iowa, the state hosting the first Republican contest in the 2016 race for the White House. Iowa kingmakers in the party such as Sen. Chuck Grassley want the Republican presidential nominee in 2016 to champion ethanol. That’s a problem for Cruz and to a lesser extent for Paul, who are both crisscrossing the state this week in advance of possible campaigns for the presidency. Cruz has introduced legislation that would...

Obamacare has proven again to be the biggest legislative failure in history, with last week's ruling that its subsidies are illegal. These subsidies induced some 5 million Americans to sign up for Obamacare but are prohibited by law as held by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in Halbig v. Burwell. This humiliation to the Obama administration was a devastating setback to legislation already disfavored by a 59-40 percent margin among the public, according to the latest CNN poll. Twice as many Americans say they are being hurt rather than helped by Obamacare. Officially known as the...

This past week’s D.C. Court of Appeals panel ruling that customers in the 36 states that didn’t establish their own exchange and use HealthCare.gov instead cannot be given premium tax credits was assailed by the program’s backers as “flagrant judicial activism.” Presidential Press Secretary Josh Earnest promised that “this insupportable ruling will be ignored. For the Court to insist upon a literal reading of the statute at this late date would unduly hamper the President’s scope of action. He cannot and will not abide having his hands tied by this judicial interference.” At issue is explicit statutory language in the...

Jonathan Gruber, a professor at MIT, is widely is regarded as the architect of both Romneycare and Obamacare. Following the D.C. Circuit’s decision in Halbig, he asserted that the provision of Obamacare limiting subsidies to the state exchanges was a “typo.” Indeed, he found it “criminal” to suggest that Obamacare was intended to work this way. But William Jacobson (via one of his readers) has unearthed video from 2012 in which Gruber explains why Obamacare limits subsidies to participants in state exchanges — the view of the statute he now finds “criminal.” Gruber stated: “I think what’s important to remember...

VIDEO AT LINK (View starting at 31:30) ” . . . if you’re a state and you don’t set up an exchange, that means your citizens don’t get their tax credits.” Obama, Democrats lying about “ambiguous” text, intent of Congress January 2012 video proves they never intended subsidies for federal exchanges. Read more: http://www.headlineoftheday.com/#ixzz38SANlSDz

A pair of federal Appeals Court rulings have sown further confusion regarding ObamaCare, even as they illuminate stark differences in ideologically-inspired interpretations of the law. First, a three-judge panel from the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 that Americans are not entitled to subsidies for their healthcare premiums if they live in a state where the federal government set up a healthcare exchange.

Well, this is awkward.Unlike the D.C. Circuit, which split 2-1, the majority here was 3-0. Even so, the most noteworthy thing about the opinion is how tormented the court seems in trying to determine what Congress intended when it said that subsidies should be available only on “an exchange established by the State.” From page 20:Page 24:Page 28:If they can’t decide what the key phrase was designed to do, why don’t they follow the D.C. Circuit’s lead and stick with the plain text? In the first excerpt above, the court frankly admits that the language of the law seems...

A federal appeals court on Tuesday dealt a setback to the Affordable Care Act, ruling that premium subsidies provided through the federal health exchange in 36 states are invalid under the writing of the law.Here's the practical effect of the ruling, if it withstands the rest of the legal process: More than 5 million, generally low-income Americans who received tax credits through the federal exchange to purchase health insurance would see their premiums explode.Avalere Health, an independent healthcare firm, released an analysis last week showing that individuals who received premium subsidies for health insurance would see a premium hike of about...

A surprising ruling from the notoriously liberal DC Circuit Court. By a 2-1 vote, judges ruled that the subsidies received by purchasing insurance through healthcare.gov website are invalid. In a potentially crippling blow to Obamacare, a federal appeals court panel declared Tuesday that government subsidies worth billions of dollars that helped 4.7 million people buy insurance on HealthCare.gov are illegal. A judicial panel in a 2-1 ruling said such subsidies can be granted only to those people who bought insurance in an Obamacare exchange run by an individual state or the District of Columbia — not on the federally run...

This is a breaking news story. Please check back for updates. In a potentially crippling blow to Obamacare, a top federal appeals court Tuesday said that billions of dollars worth of government subsidies that helped 4.7 million people buy insurance on HealthCare.gov are not legal under the Affordable Care Act.

President Obama’s old Harvard Law professor, Laurence Tribe, said that he “wouldn’t bet the family farm” on Obamacare’s surviving the legal challenges to an IRS rule about who is eligible for subsidies that are currently working their way through the federal courts. “I don’t have a crystal ball,” Tribe told the Fiscal Times. “But I wouldn’t bet the family farm on this coming out in a way that preserves Obamacare.” The law’s latest legal problem is that, as written, people who enroll in Obamacare through the federal exchange aren’t eligible for subsidies. The text of the law only provides subsidies...

Bias: You'd think that a government audit showing how ObamaCare couldn't tell whether millions of enrollees were eligible for the subsidies they're getting would be front-page news. Instead, the press hid it from view. If you wanted to read in the New York Times about these findings — which detailed rampant problems verifying eligibility and income information from millions of ObamaCare applicants — you had to dig 17 pages into the news section. In the Washington Post, the story was on page 11, after stop-the-press-stories like a change in House travel reporting rules and a puff piece on the new...

The federal Highway Trust Fund is running out of money, and some senators have proposed to fix the problem by raising gas taxes. This, however, is the wrong solution because it treats the symptom, and not the underlying reason for the shortfall. Here are five reasons for not increasing gas taxes. 1. The problem is not a shortage of funds but an excess of spending. For more than 50 years after Congress created the Highway Trust Fund in 1956 it was able to avoid a shortage of funds by a simple measure: it didn't spend more than was collected in...

Since the 1960s, the Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance (CFDA) has provided a list of all federal subsidy programs. That includes subsidies to individuals, businesses, nonprofit groups, and state and local governments. The CFDA includes subsidies for farmers, retirees, school lunches, rural utilities, the energy industry, rental housing, public broadcasting, job training, foreign aid, urban transit, and much more. The chart below shows that the number of federal subsidy programs has almost doubled since 1990, reaching 2,282 today. The genesis of the CFDA was the explosion of hand-out programs under President Lyndon Johnson. Members of Congress needed a handy guide...

Remember the Halbig case? If not, catch up right now by re-reading this post from January, written after a D.C. district court judge ruled in Obama’s favor. O-Care is a famously complex law but the lawsuit that could end up demolishing it is surprisingly simple. In a nutshell, there’s a line buried deep in the statutory text that says federal subsidies for insurance premiums will be available to anyone who buys a plan on “an Exchange established by the State.” Question: Does Healthcare.gov, the exchange built by the federal government after 34 states refused to build their own exchanges, qualify...

The D.C. Circuit Court is expected to rule any day now on the Halbig case, and supporters of the Affordable Care Act are growing nervous. In January, an Obamacare advocate described the Halbig case to a reporter for the Hill as "probably the most significant existential threat to the Affordable Care Act. All the other lawsuits that have been filed really don't go to the heart of the ACA, and this one would have." And in a fraught oral argument before the D.C. Circuit Court, the administration seemed to struggle to defend its interpretation. If the ruling goes against the...

NLPC has extensively documented howTesla Motors has taken advantage of market distortions to reap revenues – including government mandates, subsidies, and taxpayer support – not the least of which have been so-called “zero emission credits” from the state of California. But much of the revenue Tesla enjoyed last year – which often meant the difference between profit and loss – was credited based upon theoreticaltechnological capabilities and not ones actually put into practice. CEO Elon Musk has also relied on accounting gimmicks to enhance his bottom line over the last 18 months, during which a couple of quarterly earnings...

At one time, people in India had to get on a waiting list to buy Hindustan Motors' Ambassador automobile, even though it was an obvious copy of Britain's Morris Oxford of some decades earlier. The reason was simple: the Indian government would not allow cars to be imported to compete with it. The fact that the Ambassador was a copy is hardly an automatic reason for condemnation. The first Nikon camera was an obvious copy of a German camera called the Contax, and the first Canon was an obvious copy of the Leica. The difference is that, over the years,...

Remember back in the bad old days when the ObamaCare website didn’t work and everyone had a good laugh over it? Ah… good times. But then they got it fixed, millions of people signed up and we all marched happily forward into the future. Or did we?Rick Moran wrote a piece for American Thinker this week highlighting a recent report showing that, well… math is still hard. The Washington Post has learned that more than a million Americans who signed up for Obamacare insurance policies are being paid too much or too little in taxpayer funded subsidies.Bad enough, right?...