Why the Supreme Court upheld ObamaCare, in one sentence

The last time the Supreme Court upheld the Affordable Care Act, back in 2012, Chief Justice John Roberts came up with an innovative way to preserve the law. He ruled that the individual mandate was constitutional under Congress' power to tax, not its power to regulate interstate commerce, which was what the Obama administration had argued.

But in the latest decision, King v. Burwell, Roberts and five other members of the court, including swing vote Justice Anthony Kennedy, embraced wholesale the White House's argument: that Congress intended to provide health insurance subsidies to states that did not establish their own health care exchanges.

As liberals have long argued, it would make no sense if Congress' intent was to withhold such subsidies, since it would undercut the very goal of the law, which is to make health insurance more widely available. Indeed, if the subsidies were taken away, the post-ObamaCare health insurance market could collapse in a death spiral of rising premiums.

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Roberts succinctly captured this argument in his majority opinion, writing, "Congress passed the Affordable Care Act to improve health insurance markets, not to destroy them." And that, for now, is all she wrote.