{"id":16606,"date":"2015-06-25T15:17:34","date_gmt":"2015-06-25T15:17:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/colorlines.madeostudio.com\/article\/supreme-court-upholds-obamacares-federal-subsidies\/"},"modified":"2015-06-25T15:17:34","modified_gmt":"2015-06-25T15:17:34","slug":"supreme-court-upholds-obamacares-federal-subsidies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/colorlines.com\/article\/supreme-court-upholds-obamacares-federal-subsidies\/","title":{"rendered":"Supreme Court Upholds Obamacare\u2019s Federal Subsidies"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Supreme Court Upholds Obamacare\u2019s Federal Subsidies<\/h3>\n

\n By Aura Bogado<\/span> Jun 25, 2015<\/span>\n <\/p>\n <\/div>\n

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In a 6-3 ruling<\/a> this morning, the Supreme Court backed a key part of the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. The case, King v. Burwell, hinged on whether individual states that don\u2019t have their own healthcare exchanges could still be subsidized by the federal government. The high court decided yes: those states can still benefit from federal subsidies under Obamacare.<\/p>\n

Chief Justice John Roberts\u2014who was appointed by President George W. Bush\u2014and fellow conservative-leaning justice Anthony Kennedy joined liberal justices Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan to uphold federal subsidies, which will help an estimated 6.4 million people preserve their plans under Obamacare.<\/p>\n

At question was whether just four words in the Affordable Care Act, \u201cestablished by the state,\u201d meant that individual states that declined to set up a health exchange could also decide that residents in those states were barred from obtaining federal benefits. Writing for the majority, Roberts sided with the way Congress meant for the law to work:<\/p>\n

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Congress passed the Affordable Care Act to improve health insurance markets, not to destroy them. If at all possible, we must interpret the Act in a way that is consistent with the former, and avoids the latter.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Writing for the dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia chided his fellow justices for interpreting the law in context:<\/p>\n

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Today\u2019s interpretation is not merely unnatural; it is unheard of. Who would ever have dreamt that \u201cExchange established by the State\u201d means \u201cExchange established by the State or the Federal Government\u201d?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Scalia was joined by justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. <\/p>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/section>\n

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Tags<\/h3>\n <\/div>\n
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\n Affordable Care Act<\/a>Archive<\/a>Health<\/a>Obamacare<\/a>Supreme Court<\/a> <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n\n <\/div>\n<\/section>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The decision means more than six million people will continue to benefit from the health care law<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":16607,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_gspb_post_css":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_themeisle_gutenberg_block_has_review":false,"footnotes":""},"tags":[742,16402,16420,10771,13962],"article-type":[],"topic-meta":[],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/colorlines.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16606"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/colorlines.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/colorlines.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colorlines.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colorlines.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16606"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/colorlines.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16606\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colorlines.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16607"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/colorlines.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16606"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colorlines.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16606"},{"taxonomy":"article-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colorlines.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article-type?post=16606"},{"taxonomy":"topic-meta","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colorlines.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/topic-meta?post=16606"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}