In response to a question from a reporter following the G7 Summit in Krun, Germany, President Barack Obama explained why his administration has not bothered with a contingency plan in preparation for a potential ruling in favor of the plaintiffs in the King v. Burwell Supreme Court case.
President Obama said it is an "easy case" and "it's important for us to go ahead and assume that the Supreme Court is going to do what most legal scholars who've looked at this would expect them to do." He also said the high court "probably shouldn't even have… taken up [the case]," according to the Washington Post.
The president went on to say there is no reason why existing exchanges should be overturned through the court case, and that "it has been well documented that those who passed this legislation never intended for folks who were going through the federal exchange not to have their citizens get subsidies." He added this is the bipartisan opinion of both the Democrats and Republicans who helped create the legislation.
It is the intent of the law, President Obama argued, that should determine the judges' ruling on the case, pointing out that liberal Democratic judges as well as conservative judges repeatedly employ this approach to statutory interpretation.
President Obama suggested that what's "bizarre" about the case is that none of the "horrors of Obamacare" have come to pass, according to the report. "You got 16 million people who've gotten health insurance. The overwhelming majority of them are satisfied with the health insurance. It hasn't had an adverse effect on people who already had health insurance. The only effect it's had on people who already had health insurance is they now have an assurance that they won't be prevented from getting health insurance if they've got a preexisting condition, and they get additional protections with the health insurance that they do have."
When the reporter asked him why he doesn't have a plan B, the president answered, "Well, you know, I want to just make sure that everybody understands that you have a model where all the pieces connect. And there are a whole bunch of scenarios not just in relation to healthcare, but all kinds of stuff that I do, where if somebody does something that doesn't make any sense, then it's hard to fix. And this would be hard to fix. Fortunately, there's no reason to have to do it. It doesn’t need fixing. All right?"