I’ve mentioned Michael Powell’s masterpiece, The Red Shoes, before. If you haven’t seen it, I recommend it. It’s foundational cinema, filmed in that glorious, saturated, surreal, old British Technicolor. I don’t think my revealing the end will spoil it for you. At the end of the movie, the production of the ballet goes on. A pair of red pointe shoes are carried around the stage. The ballerina who was to have worn them has committed suicide.
That’s what I think of when I read about the challenges to the subsidies for states that did not implement their own healthcare exchanges that are making their way through the courts and which I think the Supreme Court should hear with all due haste. The production is the PPACA. The subsidies are the red shoes. The ballerina is Jonathan Gruber, a prime architect of the PPACA, and his explanation of the subsidies as incentives to the states to create their own exchanges. Without recognizing there once was a ballerina it all becomes surreal and imcomprehensible.
Without recognizing there once was a ballerina it all becomes surreal and incomprehensible.
The law was a bureaucratic mess, but the subsidies were for the federal exchanges. Nothing is surreal or incomprehensible about the logic behind this. Before the PPACA-haters combed through the law to find the textual error, nobody said anything about the subsidies being used in the exchanges. Gruber may not have known at one point but the CBO never even bothered to think otherwise, and many many people did know. Outside of incompetence or carelessness, there would be absolutely no reason to have the exchanges exist without subsidies. It makes no sense whatsoever.
You guys are just desperate to find some substance to hold your ceaseless hate, because you know that this half-ass law or the way it was created won’t do it. And you have too much pride and resentment to admit that maybe this whole operation of going after the law was a waste of time, so you’re just quadrupling down now on whatever you’re dealt.
You might want to go back and read my many posts on the subject of the PPACA. I don’t “hate” it. I think it’s incompetent legislation. I also think it’s a diversion and distraction from the chore of reforming healthcare in the U. S. that so desperately needs doing. But I don’t hate it.