Today Among the Halbig Troofers

Sean Davis believes he has actual new evidence to support the particularly wingnutty theory that millions of people should be denied health care coverage not merely because the card says “Moops,” but because the Moops actually invaded Spain. You will be shocked that he does not.

In defense of the theory that Congress actually intended for subsidies not to be available on the federal exchanges, Davis uses many words to cite two people. The first of these we’re familiar with: Jonathan Gruber. Which gets Davis nowhere, since privileging two stray and ambiguous comments by Gruber in 2012 over absolutely everyone else on all parts of the ideological spectrum at the time (particularly when the latter group includes not only the unambiguous statements of Gruber in 2014 but Gruber’s analysis in 2010) raises hackery to a farcical level. So, what’s his second source? He cites statements made by the superb liberal health care analyst Jon Cohn:

There is some kind of opt out, and I’ll be honest. This is not something I’ve looked into that closely because I don’t think it’s going to end up in the bill. But you know, basically this I believe was part of the Ben Nelson compromise.

Basically, where a state could opt out of the exchanges, I find it hard to believe a state would actually do that. You know, it’s – if you think about the history of these sorts of things, Medicaid was set up and is, remains, an optional program for states. States can opt out of Medicaid if they want to.

Cohn explains himself here. To be clear — proving that it can happen to the best of us — Cohn’s analysis on this point, as I’m sure he would concede, was mistaken. It should have been clear that at least some states would have refused to create exchanges in 2010. It’s true that no states were turning down Medicaid funds at the time, but 1)the block of Medicaid money is a stronger incentive than “your citizens won’t get tax credits but will also be therefore exempt from the individual mandate” and 2)not all states accepted the Medicaid immediately — Arizona held out until 1982. Given the original Medicaid holdouts despite an era of less partisan polarization and its stronger incentives, the history of Medicaid in fact made it pretty evident that some states would not establish exchanges.

But, of course, Congress (of which Cohn was not in fact a member) did anticipate this problem — which is why it created a federal backstop in cases where states did not establish exchanges. And Cohn does not say otherwise — note that he starts out by saying that “this is not something I’ve looked into that closely.” So Cohn’s excessive optimism in an off-the-cuff statement is neither here nor there; Congress didn’t share it, and the troofer argument requires the belief that Congress created a federal backstop but wanted it not to work, which is a transparently absurd reading of the statute.

So, Cohn’s statements aren’t actually new evidence at all. We’re left where we started — the troofer argument is that a single cherry skin on the ground makes an apple orchard a cherry tree. There is never going to be a threat to Drum’s 10 bucks.

…see this too. Oddly, the CBO never even considered the scenario that Halbig troofers consider the statute to have unambiguously established. Please revise your views of Senate Majority Leader Gruber accordingly.

…Abbe Gluck has more.