The huge new threat to Obamacare, explained in 2 minutes

Key Takeaways

on Friday November 7th the Obama Administration got what is arguably even worse news for them than Republicans taken over in the Senate the Supreme Court has decided to take a case called King versus Burwell which is as big a threat to Obamacare as the individual mandate case was a few years back it is an existential threat and the reason why is this Obamacare is a three-legged stool one leg is the individual mandate you have to buy insurance another leg is the ban on pre-existing conditions the insur has to to sell you Insurance even if you're sick or have been sick but the third leg of the stool and the one that's most important are the subsidies that is a way the government makes this thing that they're telling you you have to buy and then Insurance have to sell affordable and what king versus Burwell does is it says that in 36 states where the federal government is running the Health Insurance Exchange the subsidies the federal government uses to make Insurance affordable are illegal now this all comes down to nine words in the law uh where arguably the government was unclear and what the plain natives argue about those nine words is it you could only get subsidies if as a state you built your Healthcare exchange yourself the drafters of the law pretty much everyone who wrote it covered it conceptualized it anything they all say the same thing that's ridiculous we gave the federal government power to create exchanges on behalf of states and of course we always meant for those exchanges to have subsidies otherwise we've crippled the entire law if they rip these subsidies out of 36 States that's more than 7 million people for whom insurance becomes almost instantly unaffordable and when those people leave the people left are older and they're sicker then you get an insurance death spiral as premiums begin jacking up and up and up because there aren't enough healthy young people in the system in 36 States a lot of them that are working pretty well under Obamacare where millions of people have been covered this would overnight if the Supreme Court rules in favor of the plaintiffs destroy Obamacare and send those people back to the ranks of the uninsured before today most people thought the Supreme Court would just ignore this because that seems absolutely too partis crazy for them to do but there's a whole lot better chance today they're going to do it than there was [Music] yesterday