Obamacare Teeters On a Typo
Supreme Court, here we come? Probably. But if the appeals courts in D.C. and Virginia end up in agreement, the Supremes might decide to take a pass. Or maybe Chief Justice John Roberts will throw another life preserver to Obamacare as he did last year, perhaps to avoid any further damage to the high court's reputation for rising above partisan politics.
Or, worse for the ACA, the Supremes could declare what satirist Stephen Colbert calls "a triumph of typo over intent." That would move the health care law back into the boiling caldron from whence it came, a bitterly divided Congress.
Yet I would argue that lawmakers from both parties have reasons to dread that possibility. Obamacare's popularity is on the rise since last October's disastrous rollout, when its approvals hardly could have been much worse.
For example, a recent Commonwealth Fund survey of ACA recipients found 74 percent of newly covered Republicans and 85 percent of Democrats to be "very satisfied" or "somewhat satisfied" with their health coverage under ACA.
The fund found 9.5 million fewer uninsured adults since the beginning of Obamacare enrollment and a drop in the uninsured rate to 16.3 percent in April from 21 percent last September.
And in the 25 states that, along with the District of Columbia, expanded Medicaid under ACA, the rate of uninsured below the federal poverty line dipped from 28 percent to 17 percent, the fund reports. The sad news: States that refused to expand their programs showed an essentially unchanged rate of 36 percent.
The numbers are impressive. But more important, in my view, are word-of-mouth endorsements from people who are satisfied with Obamacare -- and persuade their uninsured friends and relatives to wonder why they don't have it, too.
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E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.
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