Justice Antonin Scalia on ObamaCare: 'We should start calling this law SCOTUScare'

The Supreme Court on Thursday ruled 6-3 to uphold the subsidies made available by the Affordable Care Act to states that do not establish their own health care exchanges — thereby effectively saving President Obama's health care reform law, otherwise known as ObamaCare.

Chief Justice John Roberts, writing the court's decision in King v. Burwell, said that it was clearly Congress' intent to provide such subsidies: "Congress passed the Affordable Care Act to improve health insurance markets, not to destroy them." The challengers claimed the opposite, basing their case on a single passage in the legislation whose meaning was ambiguous.

Justice Antonin Scalia, writing the dissent, disagreed about Congress' intent, saying the ambiguous passage made clear that no such subsidies should be available. He accused Roberts and the rest of the majority of rewriting the law to make the subsidies available to everyone, concluding, "We should start calling this law SCOTUScare."

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