"Chilling comment on Adam Liptak's NYT piece on the South Carolina employment benefits lawyer who focused attention the statutory text that might wreck Obamacare."

Liptak's article about Thomas M. Christina is titled "Lawyer Put Health Act in Peril by Pointing Out 4 Little Words":

�I noticed something peculiar about the tax credit,� he told a gathering of strategists at the American Enterprise Institute.... He pointed to four previously unnoticed words in the health care law... They seemed to say its tax-credit subsidies were limited to people living where an insurance marketplace, known as an exchange, had been �established by the state.�...

�Resistance is futile,� Mr. Christina said at the 2010 Washington conference, referring to state officials. �You can�t get re-elected if you turn down free money that would otherwise have been paid as tax credits to your citizens.�...

Mr. Christina did not anticipate that the Internal Revenue Service would in August 2011 propose and in May 2012 adopt regulations interpreting the law to allow subsidies in all 50 states, including those where the federal government ran the exchanges.

37 states did turn down the money and the feds stepped in and set up exchanges in those states and offering the subsidies even though these exchanges were not literally "established by the state." So now there's a case in the Supreme Court, to be argued tomorrow, which would take away the subsidies in those 37 states.

There are 709 comments on Liptak's article right now. I don't hold the NYT responsible for all the comments. I certainly don't vouch for what my commenters say, but I would take this out if I saw it in my comments. In fact, I'm only showing a screen shot because I don't want to create searchable text here:



There's only that one pushback comment from NYHuguenot � which itself goes too far � and it only arrived 11 hours after Cold's chilling remark, which has 11 thumbs up. I read Cold's comment in the middle of the night and hit the "flag" icon but I couldn't bring myself to check any of the options. "Inflammatory" and "Personal Attack" seemed closest but not precisely apt. I decided to blog about it here instead. It's evil to waft the suggestion of a violent attack. It might influence someone, though it's certainly not an imminent enough incitement to support arresting Cold. It's evil, but it's also ludicrous for Cold to project her political will � her desire to preserve the legislation � onto the seriously ill, as if they'll use their waning hours on earth to go out on an attack � they've got nothing to lose � and they'll fixate on some lawyer who noticed something in a 900-page statute that was so terribly important and yet so miserably unread.