This lawsuit never seemed to be logical to me, but King v. Burwell made it all the way up to the Supreme Court. Today, six of the nine justices affirmed that the subsidies provided to low-income health care consumers in states that didn’t set up their own insurance exchanges—including Wisconsin—were perfectly constitutional.
Conservatives, of course, are outraged. Because they’ve been trying everything in their power to destroy the Affordable Care Act. They simply don’t want to rein in health care costs, even if it means adding millions of people to the pool of private insurance companies. Not exactly socialism.
But one conservative in particular should be breathing a very deep sigh of relief—Scott Walker. Walker, as ambitious as always, didn’t allow the state to set up an insurance marketplace and refused to have anything to do with the landmark legislation. Instead, he pushed that responsibility off on the federal government and state taxpayers. Walker’s version of “reform” has actually been more expensive than fully implementing Obamacare in Wisconsin while insuring fewer people. The first four years of Walker’s reform is expected to penalize Wisconsin taxpayers more than $500 million. In Walker’s Wisconsin, up is down and down is up.
It’ll be interesting to hear how Walker reacts to the decision. On the one hand, he set up Wisconsin’s reform to take advantage of the federal subsidies for low-income consumers. On the other hand, he was more than happy to attack the ACA in any way possible.
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The real loser, of course, isn’t Wisconsin’s no-nothing senator, Ron Johnson.
It’s Wisconsin taxpayers. Because Walker set up a health care system that’s not as effective as it could be and very, very expensive.
