Ripples continue in the wake of the Halbig decision, over which Obamacare enthusiasts have been getting their knickers in a knot since the ruling came down.
In today’s Washington Post, blogger Greg Sargent wrote a detailed item explaining, or so he thought, that the intent of the law was always to provide subsidies to people who bought policies on the Federal, not just the State, exchanges. (As noted here and elsewhere, this flies in the face of repeated contemporaneous assertions by Jonathan Gruber that the law explicitly disallowed Federal-exchange subsidies as a way of noodging the States to implement their own exchanges.)
It appears, however, that Mr. Sargent’s spadework has dug up precisely the missing link between the incentive-based refusal to grant Federal-exchange subsidies, which was originally proposed in a bill drafted by the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP), and the final version of the ACA.
Blogger ‘Patterico’ explains, here.