Court case pushed by think tank could leave uninsured out in the cold
At least four million Americans will rejoin the ranks of the uninsured—and consequently lose access to affordable health care—if the Supreme Court sides with opponents of Obamacare in a case that hinges on the interpretation of a single sentence in the law. But if that’s the price that has to be paid to impose an ideology that worships the so-called free market no matter what the cost, so be it, say the folks at a libertarian influence shop in Washington.
When the high court announced earlier this month that it would decide a case on the legality of the federal government’s efforts to help low-income Americans pay for their health insurance, it was time for high-fives at the Cato Institute in Washington.
Cato’s director of health policy studies, Michael Cannon, has argued for more than a year that because of the wording in a single sentence in the Affordable Care Act, the subsidies that have made it possible for millions of folks to buy coverage are unlawful. That’s the crux of King v. Burwell, the case the justices agreed to hear.
The Cato Institute, which began life 40 years ago as the Charles Koch Foundation, describes itself as a think tank “dedicated to the values of individual liberty, limited government, free markets, and peace.” Cannon and his colleagues believe the federal government is now more involved in health care than it should be, at least from a libertarian’s perspective, because of Obamacare. And they contend we’d be a lot better off if we could turn back the clock and let the “free market” decide whether or not people can buy health insurance and how much it will cost them.
In the unfettered market Cato wants to restore, health insurers would once again be able to refuse to sell policies to millions of Americans who’ve been sick in the past. And since that free market wouldn’t include government subsidies, millions of others would once again be unable to afford coverage even if insurers were willing to sell it to them. But those stark possibilities apparently are less offensive to the folks at Cato than the provisions of Obamacare that try to fix those fundamental flaws of the free market.
There’s more to this story. Click here to read the rest at the Center for Public Integrity.
This story is part of Wendell Potter. Former CIGNA executive-turned-whistleblower Wendell Potter writes about the health care industry and the ongoing battle for health reform. Click here to read more stories in this blog.
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Copyright 2014 The Center for Public Integrity. This story was published by The Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative news organization in Washington, D.C.
