There is a very good chance the health care insurance increases may have resulted from the refusal of Republicans to appropriate and pay the "risk corridor" program. Consumer groups need to investigate the reason their premiums skyrocketed after the Affordable Care Act went into effect.
By Ian Milhiser
On Monday, (click here) the Supreme Court voted 8-1 to reject a Republican effort to sabotage parts of the Affordable Care Act. The upshot of this decision is that health insurers will receive payments owed to them under Obamacare’s “risk corridor” program.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s majority opinion in Maine Community Health Options v. United States, relies on “a principle as old as the Nation itself,” according to the opinion. That principle: “The Government should honor its obligations.”
The vote in Maine Community was not close. Eight justices joined all or nearly all of Sotomayor’s opinion, leaving Justice Samuel Alito in a lonely dissent. That’s a bit of a surprising outcome given what was at stake in the case, which involved a $12 billion Republican scheme to sabotage Obamacare.
And yet, after years of litigation seeking to destroy the Affordable Care Act, and after many more years of partisan rancor bitterly dividing the two major political parties on whether Obamacare should continue to exist, only Justice Alito was willing to endorse this particular effort to undercut President Obama’s primary legislative accomplishment.
The other eight justices all agreed that the risk corridors program should be preserved....
...Much of Sotomayor’s opinion focuses on prior precedents establishing that courts should be very reluctant to read one federal law as implicitly eliminating an obligation laid out by another law. “Repeals by implication are not favored,” Sotomayor writes, quoting from a 1974 Supreme Court decision. When confronted with two laws that seem to pull in different directions, courts should “‘regard each as effective’—unless Congress’ intention to repeal is ‘clear and manifest.’”...
