I'll leave the legal analysis of King v. Burwell, the Supreme Court case that will likely strip premium supports from Obamacare, to the lawyers.
The human story is compelling enough, and tragic. The Competitive Enterprise Institute, a think-tank funded by the Koch brothers, giant pharmaceutical firms, and other powerful corporations, selected four individual Americans they could use to place at the front of a suit that would bring down the Obama health care reforms they hated.
A reporter at Mother Jones tracked down the four individuals to find out their stories:
Brenda Levy
Levy, 64, lives outside of Richmond. She will qualify for Medicare in June, around the same time the Supreme Court is likely to issue a decision in this case. A substitute teacher with wild, frizzy gray hair and earthy clothes...Levy looks like an aging hippie. When I met her in January, she mentioned that she'd once belonged to the Sierra Club and that she used to read Mother Jones. She seemed an unusual candidate for a libertarian-tinged lawsuit designed to eviscerate Obamacare....
When I asked her if she realized that her lawsuit could potentially wipe out health coverage for millions, she looked befuddled. "I don't want things to be more difficult for people," she said. "I don't like the idea of throwing people off their health insurance."
Levy was under the impression that if the case prevailed, someone would surely fix the insurance situation, probably at the local level.... She didn't know that the Medicaid expansion was part of Obamacare, or that the same forces backing her lawsuit have opposed this expansion in her state. She was also unaware that there is no Plan B in the works to rescue the people who could lose their insurance if her case is successful....
David King
The lead plaintiff in the case, King is a burly Vietnam vet.... The mustachioed 64-year-old...[works] as a self-employed limo driver....
When the lawsuit was filed in September 2013, King's projected 2014 income was $39,000, entitling him to a premium subsidy for health insurance that would allow him to purchase a bronze plan for $275 a month.... Without the subsidy, the same plan would cost $648 a month. King wouldn't say whether he's currently covered, but he was adamant that he would never utilize Obamacare, no matter what....
I asked King what he got out of the case. He replied that the only benefit he would receive from the case was the satisfaction of smashing Obamacare, which he believes bilks hardworking taxpayers to support welfare recipients. He said he doesn't care if millions of Americans lose their health coverage, because "they're probably not paying for it anyway."...
King may soon have his insurance problems relieved by a different government health care plan. He'll be eligible for Medicare in October.
Rose Luck
[T]he home address she provided in legal filings turned out to be a $200-a-week extended-stay motel on a commercial strip in Petersburg, Virginia, a last refuge for people who've fallen on hard times. She had long since moved on by the time I tried to contact her there. In 2012, the bank foreclosed on the house Luck and her husband had purchased only a year earlier. Luck hung up on me when I finally reached her by phone....
But public records provide a snapshot of her life and hardships. Since the late 1990s, legal judgments have been entered against her and her husband in Virginia courts for nearly $5,000 in unpaid medical bills (they have since been paid off). Such judgments are the hallmark of people who lack insurance or who are underinsured....
Along with her anti-Obama sentiments, Luck's Facebook page makes clear that she has experienced some serious health problems—she's reported several trips to the hospital—and suggests she badly needs health coverage.
Doug Hurst
Hurst, 63, and his wife, Pam Trainor Hurst, owned a Virginia Beach remodeling company that went bankrupt at the peak of the financial crisis. According to their 2010 bankruptcy filings, which included their 2009 tax return, health care costs were a considerable expense for the Hursts. Their 2009 tax return lists more than $8,500 in out-of-pocket medical expenses.
Of the four plaintiffs, Doug Hurst is eligible for the most savings under Obamacare. According to legal filings, his projected income for 2014 was $39,000. Under Obamacare, he could have purchased a bronze health plan for $62.49 a month, a fraction of the $655 a month the bankruptcy filings show he paid in late 2010.
All of these people seem to fit into the Tea Party brand of political views. They either don't know enough about the case to understand how they're being used against people very much like themselves, or they don't care, because they hate Obama more than they care about others, and apparently even more than they care about themselves.
It's tragic, really, like a corrosive mental sickness.
I wonder if they'll ever realize how they've been used so cynically by people who don't care a fig about anything but money.
I wonder if they think about how history will record their actions against the well-being of their fellow Americans in the long, long, struggle to gain the rights that people in other advanced Western countries take as their due.