Federal court asks Obama to follow the law, media lose their freaking minds
By Dustin Hurst | Watchdog.org
One might not believe asking the federal government to follow its own rules is a big deal.
It makes sense, right?
The modern media, particularly the left-leaners of the world, couldn’t handle the ruling in the Halbig v. Burwell case handed down Tuesday by a U.S. District Court of Appeals asking for just that.
The ruling was more or less a simple one: President Barack Obama’s administration cannot provide health insurance subsidies to people who purchased coverage through the federal exchange because the law doesn’t allow it. The law, based on the exact wording, only permits subsidies to flow through exchanges operated by states.
Oops. Maybe Congress should have read the bill to find out what’s in it before passing it in 2010.
Regardless, the left-wing media immediately went into a tizzy over the ruling, spreading distortions and false attacks to prop up their narrative.
Mother Jones, usually the leader in lefty tomfoolery, didn’t disappoint Tuesday. Stephanie Mencimer, a staff writer for the publication, tweeted this dandy to express her dismay:
Wow, that’s some guy. He’s going to take away the health coverage of 5 million people? That’s epic.
Except he’s not. More on that later.
Mencimer didn’t stop there, though. Her headline called the ruling “extreme,” and her piece attacked a small business owner for defending his rights.
The New Republic joined the fun, too, tweeting this nifty little distortion:
See the problem there? This publication, like Mother Jones, distorted the truth about Obamacare, subsidies and the nature of the marketplace.
It is true millions of people could be affected by the Halbig case. Experts project as many as 5 million people could lose their hefty health care subsidies the law pays out each month. But, unfortunately for Mencimer’s carefully crafted narrative, 5 million people will not lose their health care. Not at all.
The New Republic came in with a slightly more accurate attack, but failed to present the full truth. Sure, health insurance prices will rise because redistributed handouts are now, according to the appeals court, illegal.
Now, those 5 million people could finally see the real impact of Obamacare, unvarnished by subsidies hiding the true cost of the complex law.
Josh Archambault, a senior analyst for the Florida-based Foundation for Government Accountability, said Tuesday’s ruling could bring more transparency to the system.
“Folks will have to pay a larger share of their insurance premiums, instead of federal taxpayers,” Archambault told Watchdog.org. “Premiums will not go up, as they were up to begin with under the ACA, it is just a matter if the full cost is transparent to an individual or masked by federal dollars.”
The Cato Institute, which backed the law in court, praised the Halbig ruling for forcing government to adhere to the law.
“The D.C. Circuit ruled today that the government isn’t Humpty Dumpty and so statutory text doesn’t mean whatever the government says it means,” Ilya Shapiro, editor of the Cato Supreme Court Review, wrote to the media in a prepared statement.
“Today’s ruling shows that Obamacare, a cynical political bargain that lacked popular support from day one, simply doesn’t work as conceived.”
Of course, the leftists continued go ballistic throughout the day.
Over at Vox, head explainer Ezra Klein whipped out his crystal ball to predict the next jaunt in the Halbig’s case’s journey.
“The Halbig case could destroy Obamacare,” Klein wrote. “But it won’t. The Supreme Court simply isn’t going to rip insurance from tens of millions of people in order to teach Congress a lesson about grammar.”
“Rip insurance from tens of millions?” Wowzers.
Tuesday’s ruling may not matter much anyway.
For his part, Obama vowed — to no one’s surprise — to ignore the Halbig ruling and continue handing out taxpayer cash. The president, in the grandest distortion of the day, slammed Halbig as nothing more than a partisan attack on Obamacare.
