When will the attacks on the ACA stop?

Conservatives are all a-flutter over the U.S. Supreme Court's announcement Friday that it will hear another challenge to the Affordable Care Act in a case they hope will destroy President Barack Obama's signature health care law.

The case, King v. Burwell, will hinge on proving that the ACA as written doesn't provide tax credits to Americans in the 30-plus states that didn't create their own exchanges but instead had users sign up through the federal exchanges.

That should be more difficult than it would seem, since at the time the ACA was enacted, it was well understood that without the subsidies the individual mandate was not viable as a mechanism to create a stable insurance market.

The law clearly provides those same credits to people who bought insurance through the state exchanges, but challengers argue that poor wording in one section doesn't make it clear, though in subsequent sections of the law, the intent is clearly defined.

On the heels of the court's announcement, conservatives -- ever spiteful -- posted a new video of MIT economist and ACA architect Jonathan Gruber, who during a panel discussion, made less-than-thoughtful remarks about writing the law in a "tortured" way to have it not look or feel like a tax. Why? Because voters -- actually Congress -- wouldn't pass a tax.

"Call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever," Gruber said.

That's a revelation? Remember the choice Tennesseans made last week on a state constitutional amendment banning an income tax and handcuffing future Tennessee policymakers? We clearly would cut off our children's education before we would pass a tax or even let future generations consider one.

But speaking of revelations, one Forbes columnist recently wrote: " ... the [ACA] law's complex system of insurance regulation is a way of concealing from voters what Obamacare really is: a huge redistribution of wealth from the young and healthy to the old and unhealthy."

Well, well. Coming from Forbes -- the so-called money experts of all time -- one would expect a better-rounded view. After all, isn't that exactly the model that our BlueCross BlueShield, Aetna, pick-any-insurance, actuarial pools have always been built on? We pay premiums for decades while we're healthy for the eventual time when we aren't. Except in those pools, pre-Obamacare, when we got sick we were covered initially and then we lost any coverage due to "pre-existing conditions." And, of course, the premiums for everyone else kept going up and up.

Here's what the ACA has done in one short year: The number of uninsured Americans has fallen by about 25 percent this year compared to last year. The biggest drops were in states that expanded Medicaid with the ACA mlney -- like Kentucky where the number of uninsured fell from about 24 percent down to about 14 percent. Tennessee did not expand Medicaid, and our drop was only down from about 21 percent to 19 percent, and we're losing money.

In Hamilton County, the uninsured fell from 16 percent to 13 percent. Ask Erlanger hospital if that helps and executives will say yes because it cuts their losses for treating poor and uninsured people who cannot pay.

The fact that our Congress -- and courts -- continue to drag out old footage and arguments but no new ideas about a law that now has helped up to 11 million Americans get insurance is, in fact, testament to some stupidity -- that of Congress.

And if voters marked ballots for those clueless lawmakers (and some clearly did on Nov. 4) then that, too, speaks to the stupidity of far too many American voters.

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