The real import of the Jon Gruber fracas
It would be much easier if (some) people would simply say “Of course this normally should be kicked back into the legislature for clarification. But I don’t want to do that because I don’t regard Republican control of the House, and how that control is used, as a legitimate form of rule.” One may agree, or not, but the nature of the case is pretty clear.
Instead we read irrelevant blog posts and tweets about how the experts meant to have subsidies at all levels all along. Of course they did. But did Congress know what it was doing in a detailed sense, one way or another? Hard to say, personally I doubt it, and Alex says no. The basic starter hypothesis here is that many of them knew this was a health care bill, it would extend coverage, it had a mandate, it had some subsidies, it had a Medicaid expansion, it had some complicated cost control, it was approved by leading Democratic Party experts, it met some CBO standards, and beyond that — if you pull out those who were confused on the details of the exchanges and the subsidies do you still have majority support? I doubt it. Most absurd of all are the tweets asking the critics to show Congress intended no federal-level subsidies.
So, to return to the title of this post, the import of the Gruber fracas is to show that if he can be confused (more than once, at that, and is “confused” even the right word?) a lot of ACA supporters in Congress probably were confused too.
So given that across-the-board subsidies are not written into the bill formally, and given the importance of precedent, and rule of law, why not kick the matter back into the legislature for redrafting? Which brings us back to the first paragraph of this blog post…
I have drawn on some Ross Douthat tweets in thinking through this post.