Big Government's IT Problem

[Geee]

National Review:

Earlier this week, I was thinking of writing a column about the lying and duplicity of Obamacare backers who argued that the difference between providing subsidies in states with state-run health exchanges and providing no subsidies in states with federal exchanges resulted from inadvertence or a typographical error.

 

Typical among them was MIT health-care expert Jonathan Gruber. The folks at the Competitive Enterprise Institute found video of him in 2012 arguing that all or most states would create their own exchanges because they wouldn’t get subsidies if they let the federal government run their exchanges. That was just a “speako” (the oral equivalent of a typo), Gruber replied.

 

 

And Phil Kerpen of American Commitment published 2010 comments from New Republic health-care maven Jonathan Cohn in which he explained that “a state could opt out of the exchanges.” But it’s “not something I’ve looked into that closely,” Cohn added.

Yet people like Gruber, Cohn, and columnist E. J. Dionne attacked the D.C. Circuit’s Halbig v. Burwell decision – which, quoting the statute’s language, ruled that subsidies can’t be paid in states with federal exchanges – as “judicial activism,” based on a typo.