Obama: No Plan B if Supreme Court cuts Obamacare

[WestVirginiaRebel]

Hot Air:

Surely President Barack Obama hoped that his suggestion that asthma rates have increased as a result of climate change would be the newsiest nugget to emerge from his interview with CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta. That is apparently the latest front in the perennial quest to make the issue of global warming both relatable and pressing for the broader public, and Dr. Gupta lent that claim substantial credence. But the most compelling bit that Gupta drew out of the president during their exclusive interview was Obama’s admission that there is no plan to move forward if the Supreme Court rules against the government in King v. Burwell and strips illegal federal subsidies from millions of Affordable Care Act beneficiaries.

 

Gupta appeared to be shocked when he asked the president about his proposed way forward if his administration finds itself on the wrong end of a Supreme Court ruling in June. The CNN correspondent seemed surprised by Obama’s boilerplate condemnation of a ruling that would result in “millions of people losing their health insurance” and his admission that “there aren’t that many outcomes available” to mitigate that condition.

 

“If it doesn’t happen, he just says there’s going to be millions of people who lose those subsidies, lose their health care insurance,” Gupta observed. “There is no particular Plan B.”

 

While the president’s hands are probably tied if the Court pursues that course, it’s not clear that Obama would find that an unwelcome condition. Politically, the ACA has been and remains an albatross around his party’s collective neck, and Democrats are going to face significant headwinds in 2016 as a result of the public’s traditional resistance to handing the party in power a third term in the White House. Shifting the political burden associated with Obamacare from Democrats and onto Republicans in Congress, who would be subject to endless haranguing if they did not immediately restore subsidies to those who lost them in the wake of a Supreme Court ruling for the plaintiff, would serve Obama’s political purposes.

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Throwing Obamacare under the bus?