from the recent issue of the magazine, The New Yorker,by James Surowiecki:
"few days after the midterm elections, the Supreme Court announced that it would hear King v. Burwell, a challenge to the Affordable Care Act in which the plaintiffs are arguing that people who live in states which have not set up their own health-insurance exchanges?and who therefore find their insurance through the federal exchange, Healthcare.gov?are not eligible for tax credits that the law provides....At first glance, this might all sound good from a Republican perspective. After all, if Obamacare is an unacceptable imposition on individual freedom and an unworkable intrusion into health care, anything that makes it less effective would seem to be welcome. Yet the disappearance of subsidies is going to put governors and legislatures in states that haven?t established their own exchanges (nearly every red state) in a very difficult position. After all, their refusal?mostly politically motivated?to establish those exchanges will be the reason that their citizens lose subsidies, even as people in states like California and New York are reaping all the benefits of the law. The state legislatures will also, in effect, be responsible for insurance suddenly becoming far more expensive for millions of people. Finally, the politicians will also be putting a severe dent in the bottom line of insurance companies in their state, since the absence of subsidies guarantees that insurance companies are going to lose the customers they want (healthy people with low health-care costs) and get stuck with those they don?t (sick people whose health-care costs are sure to dwarf their premium payments)."