White House: ‘No easy fix’ for ObamaCare court ruling

The Obama administration is casting doubt on Congress’s ability to pass an ObamaCare ‘fix’ if the Supreme Court decides later this month to gut the healthcare law’s subsidies.  

With less than a month before the ruling, White House spokesman Josh Earnest is warning that Republicans will not be able to prevent the “significant turmoil” that he said would result from a court ruling against the administration.

“There’s no easy fix to doing that, particularly when you consider how difficult it has been for common-sense pieces of legislation to move through the Congress,” he said at a briefing Friday.

{mosads}“With something as controversial as health care, it’s hard to imagine any sort of legislative fix passing through that legislative body,” Earnest said.

The court’s ruling on King v. Burwell could come as early as next week, though it is widely expected to be handed down in late June.

The high stakes case, which was argued before the Supreme Court in March, threatens to eliminate billions of dollars of ObamaCare subsidies for people in at least 34 states. As many as 8 million people could lose their subsidies.

The Obama administration has warned of a marketplace meltdown if the subsidies are struck down, but has repeatedly said that it is not preparing a fallback plan for that scenario.

The response has angered Republicans in Congress, some of whom have accused the administration of secretly preparing a plan but refusing to discuss it, hoping to influence the court with the idea that there is no alternative to the present situation.  

Earnest’s comments also suggest that the White House has little confidence in the plan that Democrats in Congress are expected to pursue if the GOP-backed case prevails. Democrats will try to pass a one-page bill to tweak the law’s text to eliminate the ambiguities that brought the case to court initially.

Meanwhile, House and Senate Republicans have each commissioned working groups to draft their own response plans. 

When asked if the Obama administration is in contact with any members of Congress who have proposed alternative plans, Earnest declined to answer.

“I don’t have any conversations to tell you about,” he said. “But I can tell you that the administration continues to be completely confident in the strength of the legal arguments that were presented to the Supreme Court.”