New York Times correspondent Abby Goodnough asks if the latest legal challenges to ObamaCare are signaling a divide within the party or are Republicans still recovering from getting burned when the ACA went to the Supreme Court last time?”
About 5 million middle-income people in 36 states currently are receiving subsidies for health insurance through the federal exchanges. Since 87 percent of them are receiving subsidies to purchase coverage, many likely would no longer be able to afford coverage.
Ms. Goodenough reports that after the health overhaul law was passed in 2010, Republicans on both the state and federal level spoke with one voice flatly rejecting ObamaCare. However, in the years following ObamaCare’s passage while the majority of governor’s still remain critical of the law, nine governors have expanded their Medicaid programs and four more governors are considering Medicaid expansion this year at the urging of hospitals and business groups.
In the past months, a number of conservative groups and political leaders have filed Amicus briefs in the King vs. Burwell challenge that will be heard by the Supreme Court on March 4. As a result, Ms. Goodenough reports that new attention is being drawn to the divisions within the Republican Party over the law. . Almost two dozen briefs were filed on behalf of the plaintiffs in the King case, but she says “shockingly few state officials” signed on.
One of the few exceptions was the Amicus brief filed by the Galen Institute which had 19 Republican state legislators in Tennessee and two in Ohio join. Other notable briefs include one filed by six Republican state attorneys general- in Alabama, Georgia, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina and West Virginia. Divides in the party can be seen within states like Florida where Senator Marco Rubio who signed a brief with 14 members of Congress, but Florida’s Republican Attorney General, Pam Bondi, did not join in the States brief.