Hi Truthseekers! Mike is in Washington D.C. this week, and tonight, in a special broadcast (tune in here), he will be speaking with Congressmen, policy makers, affected individuals, and health care insiders about the Supreme Court's hearing on King v. Burwell, which again threatens to undo much of the good that was done by the Affordable Care Act.
"The King challenge, which focuses on a handful of words in that famously long piece of legislation, is a clever one. But it's too clever by half. Finding for the challengers would require taking a few words in the ACA out of their proper context, ignoring the law's structure and purpose, and even jettisoning the conservative justices' own pro-states' rights views.
"The challengers zero in on a sub-clause in the ACA describing how federal tax credits to help people buy health insurance are to be computed. It says such credits can go only to people buying insurance through 'an exchange established by the state.' But the ACA specifically authorizes the federal government to establish substitute exchanges for states that ask for such help. The challengers claim the IRS wrongly interpreted the law's reference to 'state-established' exchanges to include the exchanges the feds set up on behalf of the 34 states that didn't establish their own."
So here we go again. Millions of Americans are again subject to losing subsidized insurance, thanks to the Republican representatives they elected to state and national office.
What a scam they have run on the American people. How they convinced so many of us (well, not us) to vote against our best interests and send these monsters to Congress, where they proceeded to break every phony campaign promise and work to satisfy their corporate backers, instead of their constituents. Our social safety net is under attack on all fronts, from social security and disability, to unemployment insurance, food stamps, children's lunch programs, minimum wage, medicare, medicaid, and now affordable health care -- still in its infancy.
We've sung this song so many times before. The brainwashing of the populace by the mainstream media machine has been effective beyond Murdoch's wildest imagination. Sometime in the last few decades, journalists abandoned their stance as independent seekers of the truth and merely spewed whatever propaganda best suited to advancing their advertisers' interests.
Perhaps they are, truly, the Fourth Estate. A branch of government representing the corporations, but without the checks or balances on their power from any other branch. This corporate takeover of our media has been painfully felt ever since the Fairness Doctrine was eliminated in 1987 (who was President again then ...). The Supreme Court put the final nail in the coffin with its Citizens United decision, essentially legalizing an endless stream of Koch-Brothers-style broadcast propaganda.
And now the Supremes are poised to execute another blow to the middle class that would throw millions of Americans back into the nightmarish world of the uninsured.
Please listen tonight -- the stakes are high, as they are so often these days. The fate of millions is hanging by the thread of a silky black robe.