Vox Sentences: Obamacare is really, finally safe from the Supreme Court

John Roberts, King-slayer

Call me Jaime Lannister. Get it? (Win McNamee/Getty Images)

• The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that people getting health insurance through federal Obamacare exchanges are eligible for tax subsidies in the case of King v. Burwell.

  [Vox / Sarah Kliff]

• The case revolved around four words in the Affordable Care Act, stating that subsidies flow through an "Exchange established by the State."

  [Vox / Adrianna McIntyre and Sarah Kliff]

• 16 states and DC have their own exchanges, but 34 use federal exchanges. If the Court ruled that federal exchange customers weren't eligible for subsidies, 6.4 million people who signed up that way would have lost an average of $272 a month.

  [Vox / Sarah Kliff]

• But it didn't rule that way, and the last really significant near-term threat to Obamacare is gone.

  [Vox / Sarah Kliff]

• Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for himself, Anthony Kennedy, and the court's four liberals, argued that while the phrasing is ambiguous, in the context of the whole law it's clear subsidies were supposed to be available on federal exchanges.

  [Supreme Court / John Roberts]

• Roberts: "Congress passed the Affordable Care Act to improve health insurance markets, not to destroy them. If at all possible, we must interpret the Act in a way that is consistent with the former, and avoids the latter."

  [Vox / Dylan Matthews]

• Roberts trolled the court's conservatives by citing their dissent in the 2012 case that weighed the constitutionality of the law's requirement that individuals buy health insurance.

  [Vox / Andrew Prokop]

• The dissent, written by Antonin Scalia, is scathing, saying the bill should be redubbed "SCOTUSCare" and that "Words no longer have meaning if an Exchange that is not established by a State is 'established by the State.'"

  [Vox / Dara Lind]

• That statement suggests that Justice Scalia doesn't understand semantic holism.

  [Vox / Matt Yglesias]

• Ezra Klein: This was a fundamentally conservative ruling, premised on judicial restraint and deference to Congress.

  [Vox / Ezra Klein]

• If you want to read the best case for the losing side — that the subsidies really should have been stripped — I suggest Philip Klein's take here.

  [Washington Examiner / Philip Klein]

• For more, see our absurdly comprehensive explainer on the case, by Adrianna McIntyre and Sarah Kliff.

  [Vox / Adrianna McIntyre and Sarah Kliff]

• Or see Sarah explain the case on video here.

  [YouTube / Sarah Kliff and Joe Posner]

The disparate impact case is coming from inside the house!

Shutterstock

• The Court also upheld a lower court ruling that the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs was guilty of housing discrimination

  [Supreme Court / Anthony Kennedy]

• The case concerned the Fair Housing Act of 1968, and whether plaintiffs using the act to challenge discrimination have to prove discriminatory intent, or just "disparate impact": that regardless of intent, one group is disadvantaged in practice based on their race, color, sex, national origin, or religion.

  [Vox / Tez Clark]

• Disparate impact is a crucial part of the Fair Housing Act, since it lets plaintiffs fight discrimination without having to prove discriminatory intent, which can be very difficult.

  [Vox / Jenée Desmond-Harris]

• The case was brought by the Inclusive Communities Project, a group trying to help its clients (mostly low-income black families) find housing in the mostly white Dallas suburbs.

  [NYT / Adam Liptak]

• The families it helps use housing vouchers, which not all landlords take, but all landlords getting federal tax credits are required to accept. The group sued the Texas housing agency for giving too many tax credits to landlords in minority neighborhoods, making it harder to integrate white suburbs.

• The case was 5-4, with Anthony Kennedy writing the majority for himself and the court's four liberals. Samuel Alito wrote a dissent joined by the court's other three conservatives, and Clarence Thomas separately wrote his own dissent, joined by no one but himself.

  [Supreme Court / Anthony Kennedy, Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas]

• Thomas tried to argue that not all racial disparities are unfair or unlawful by appealing to the fact that most NBA players are black.

  [Vox / German Lopez]

• The case relates surprisingly closely to events in McKinney, Texas, a city about 30 miles north of Dallas, where police drew guns and slammed a teenage girl to the ground in an apparent attempt to bar black teens from a swimming pool.

  [CityLab / Kriston Capps]

• If the case had gone the other way, it would've become easier to bar black families from a lot more than just swimming pools.

• Read Jenée Desmond-Harris's full explainer on disparate impact here.

  [Vox / Jenée Desmond-Harris]

Maybe all I need is a shot in the arm

Suck it up, kid. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

• California's Assembly approved a bill eliminating religious or philosophical exemptions for schoolchildren's vaccinations, sending it to Gov. Jerry Brown (D) for approval.

  [LA Times / Patrick McGreevy]

• Brown hasn't said if he'll sign the bill, but he's widely expected to. His office stated, "The governor believes that vaccinations are profoundly important and a major public health benefit and any bill that reaches his desk will be closely considered."

  [NYT / Jennifer Medina]

• That's among the strictest laws in the country. Only Mississippi and West Virginia ban religious exemptions; many states allow religious but not philosophical objections, and many more allow both.

  [Vox / Julia Belluz]

• Overall, California has a very high vaccination rate — over 90 percent — but there are some schools where more than half of children have been exempted due to their parents' beliefs.

  [KQED / Lisa Aliferis]

• Reminder: There's no good reason, besides medical necessity, to not get vaccinated on schedule, and failure to do so risks spreading illness to infants, the elderly, and people with poor immune systems.

  [Vox / German Lopez]

• The measure was prompted in part by a measles outbreak at Disneyland earlier this year, but it's unclear how much vaccine exemptions played into that incident. For example, an outbreak last year often blamed on Jenny McCarthy-style anti-vaxxers was actually due to a traveling Amish missionary.

  [Vox / Julia Belluz]

• Opponents of the bill have engaged in extreme and false scare tactics, such as placing ads in the Sacramento Bee showing tombstones of children who supposedly died from "lethal vaccination."

  [KPCC / Rebecca Plevin]

• That is, of course, bullshit. Vaccines are safe.

  [Vox / German Lopez]

• Be sure to read Julia Belluz's piece on "vaccine delayers" and what motivates them. They're a surprisingly distinct group from outright anti-vaxxers.

  [Vox / Julia Belluz]

• And read German Lopez's whole card on the vaccine debate here.

  [Vox / German Lopez]

Misc.

• Human Rights Watch is alleging that the Colombian military slaughtered hundreds, perhaps thousands, of civilians and passed them off as slain FARC rebels in an attempt to show its counterinsurgency efforts were succeeding.

  [Washington Post / Nick Miroff]

• The Casio F91-W is a pretty basic digital watch. It's also the preferred timepiece of al-Qaeda.

  [Now I Know / Dan Lewis]

• Did former Vice President Hubert Humphrey have a secret plan to force the implementation of Full Communism? No, but this is a fun case that his last major bill would've done that.

  [Jacobin / Adam Hilton]

• Recycling in the US is struggling — and single-stream recycling where you don't have to separate your bottles from your cans and whatnot is a major reason why.

  [Washington Post / Aaron Davis]

• In case you were worried that patent trolls aren't making enough money from socially useless activities, fear not! Congress is considering taxing income from patents and intellectual property at a lower rate.

  [Bloomberg / Richard Rubin]

Verbatim

• "The Affordable Care Act is probably the most progressive policy Americans born after the Great Society will witness in their lifetimes."

  [Al Jazeera America / Sean McElwee]

• "The Bachelorette may be over slut-shaming its contestants, but, for now, its contestants remain more than capable of doing it for themselves."

  [Slate / Willa Paskin]

• "My hope is that marriage equality queers marriage, rather than straightening queers — that we reinvent it and keep reinventing it, and sexuality is finally acknowledged as having no inherent moral value except, perhaps, when it is ignored."

  [New Republic / Alexander Chee]

• "The typical middle-income black family lives in a neighborhood with lower incomes than the typical low-income white family."

  [NYT / David Leonhardt]

• "What makes 'Trap Queen' such a refreshing revelation is that — from its lyrics to its beat — the song is an amalgam of the relatable and the niche. At some points it is love reimagined as a Lamborghini, pole-dancing, and cocaine; at others, it's a majestic Jane Austen–esque tribute to fidelity, mutual success, and financial responsibility."

  [Vox / Alex Abad-Santos]

Video of the day

• The real voice of Siri explains the art of voiceover

  [YouTube]

Explanatory journalism is a public good

At Vox, we believe that everyone deserves access to information that helps them understand and shape the world they live in. That's why we keep our work free. Support our mission and help keep Vox free for all by making a financial contribution to Vox today.

One-Time Monthly Annual

$95/year

$120/year

$250/year

$350/year

Other

$

Yes, I'll give $120/year

Yes, I'll give $120/year

We accept credit card, Apple Pay, and Google Pay. You can also contribute via