Health care subsidies issue rushed to Court

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Scotus : Health care subsidies issue rushed to Court

By Lyle Denniston on Jul 31, 2014 at 11:20 pm

 

Nine days after two federal appeals courts reached opposite rulings on a major new threat to the federal health care law, challengers pursuing that threat rushed to the Supreme Court on Thursday with a plea to step in and settle the dispute as soon as possible. A petition for review was filed in a case from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, which had rejected the challenge on July 22. That conflicted directly with a ruling on the same day by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit (see this earlier post.)

 

At issue in the new case of King v. Burwell is whether government tax subsidies that have enabled millions of lower-income Americans to afford to sign up for individual health care coverage are illegal because they were granted for use on insurance marketplaces set up by the federal government. Those exchanges are functioning in thirty-sxi states.