Malstrøm

David Hockney, The Maelstrom: Bodo (2002), via Museum Musing.

This is such an interesting little story, as we await the word from the Supreme Court this morning, from Nancy Marshall-Genzer at APM Marketplace, for what it says and what it doesn't say:

The King v. Burwell case before the Supreme Court is a challenge to the health care law, saying health insurance subsidies should only go to people who bought insurance on state-run exchanges. A decision is expected in days, and if the Court rules against the Obama administration, people in states using the federal insurance marketplace would lose their subsidies.

And they might just turn to Connecticut for help. Connecticut succeeded in launching its own insurance marketplace, or exchange, that worked even as the federal government and other states struggled. 

Now Connecticut is getting calls from states on the federal exchange, who might want to use Connecticut’s software if they have to set up their own marketplaces, says Jim Wadleigh, CEO of Access Health Connecticut, the Connecticut exchange. 

“We’ve probably gotten over a dozen calls from other states," he says, estimating that 90 percent the calls were from officials in Republican-led states. Wadleigh won’t say which ones, "because it would create quite a political maelstrom that I’m trying to stay out of,” he says. 

Not a word here about what Congress and Obama are going to do if Scotus accedes to the loony arguments of King and ends government tax credits on health policies from the federal exchange. Not a word about Republican governors swearing to free their groaning citizens from the heavy chains of Obamacare. Just Republican governors very quietly trying to find out what's the fastest way of starting a state exchange, so they'll be ready to do it if the decision goes that way.

So they're calling up Connecticut because it has experience and a product—when Democratic Maryland's exchange turned out to be a disaster (thanks, governor O'Malley!), the state went to Connecticut for help and quickly extricated itself, and Republican states could do the same. As if they didn't really think the ACA was a diabolical Communist plot after all.

Maybe they plan to emulate Senator McConnell of Kentucky, who campaigned last year on the theme of how Kentucky's Obamacare program wasn't Obamacare and taking credit for it himself, while his timid Democratic opponent whatshername refused to contradict him, lest people might get the idea that she supported Obamacare, god forbid, in a state where people love Obamacare, but only as long as you pretend it as nothing to do with Obama.

It's almost as if instead of overthrowing the ACA Scotus would be rooting it more firmly. Except in Texas, of course. Texas would rather die, and will, martyrs to Texas-style freedom.

I really can't believe the Court will rule that way anyway, bad as it is. It's just too stupid, even for them. But it's funny, isn't it, to think of all those other states, Michigan, Ohio, Arizona, Florida, North Carolina, where they'd be tiptoeing around that malstrøm trying to get folks their Obamacare in secret.

Update: Subsidies survive 6-3! With Roberts and Kennedy both. I think I called that at one point or another.