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Rachel Sachs (Academic Fellow)
Health Affairs Blog
June 30, 2015

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From the piece:

Chief Justice Roberts has once again saved a core provision of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). In King v Burwell, a majority of six Justices upheld the validity of an Internal Revenue Service (IRS) rule interpreting the text of the ACA to permit tax credits to be distributed through both state and federal insurance exchanges. As a result, the millions of Americans receiving subsidies through federally established exchanges in the states that have not chosen to establish their own exchanges will continue to receive them.

Much of the briefing and argument in King involved the legal principle known as Chevron deference, in which courts generally defer to agencies’ reasonable interpretations of statutes if the statutory language is ambiguous. In this case, the government first argued that the statutory language clearly permitted tax credits to be made available on federally established exchanges. But even if the statute was ambiguous, it contended, Chevron counseled deference to the IRS’ reasonable interpretation of the statute. [...]

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