Obamacare chaos precedes court ruling on subsidies

Phillip Klien:

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This is where the current tax season could tilt the scales. In the next few months — leading up to a decision by the Supreme Court — a major healthcare story will be about how the Obama administration has made tax season a mess for millions of Americans through it’s bungled handling of subsidies.

We’ve already begun to see headlines reflecting this. For instance, the administration has already announced that it had sent 800,000 erroneous tax forms to individuals that calculated their subsidies, forcing them to delay filing taxes. The error affected up to 20 percent of those who received subsidies through the federal exchange in 2014.

Meanwhile, H&R Block, the nation’s largest tax preparer, has found that 52 percent of tax filerswho obtained subsidies to purchase insurance through Obamacare had to pay back money to the federal government because the subsidies they received were higher than they should have been. The average amount that these filers had to send back to the IRS was $530.

Taken together, these and other stories are demonstrating a pattern of the Obama administration botching the handling of insurance subsidies.

Given this environment, if the Supreme Court then rules that the administration illegally handed out subsidies to another group — in this case, residents of states that didn’t set up their own exchanges — why should Republicans be seen as the ones to blame? The reality would be that the Obama administration threw millions of people’s lives into chaos by making them dependent on subsidies that they weren’t legally entitled to claim.

By the time the Supreme Court rules, Republicans will have a litany of examples to use making the case that Democrats mishandled subsidies. So maybe it's time to rethink the operating assumption that Republicans will automatically be put on the defensive by any Supreme Court ruling that invalidates the subsidies.
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Democrats always try to shift responsibility for their screw ups.  They never admit their own incompetence.

But what they are really trying to do with this strategy is avoid having to compromise with Republicans on healthcare.   They refused any GOP ideas when they wrote this monstrosity and they are desperately trying to avoid having to put any GOP ideas in a bill to fix the mess they made.