Pence And Zoeller Asking Supreme Court To Cancel 118,000 Hoosier Health Insurance Policies

Gov. Mike Pence and Attorney General Greg Zoeller want to stop Hoosiers who have no other option than to purchase health insurance from an Affordable Care Act exchange that offers subsidies from obtaining health insurance. If those Hoosiers are unable to purchase those policies, they will have no health insurance because it's too costly to obtain health insurance coverage in the private marketplace without the subsidies. The self-employed and people working for a growing number of employers who offer their employees no health insurance have no other choice than to purchase health insurance offered on the exchanges. Because Gov. Pence opposed the health care law, he stubbornly refused to enact a health care exchange. Now he and Greg Zoeller are asking the U.S. Supreme Court to declare it unlawful for Hoosiers dependent on those subsidies offered by the ACA to obtain them, effectively leaving them without any health insurance.

The Northwest Indiana Times' Dan Carden has more on their efforts to take away health insurance from at least 118,000 Hoosiers:

In the filing, written by Indiana Solicitor General Thomas Fisher, a Jasper County native, the state argues any plain text reading of the 2010 health law clearly requires state creation of an insurance marketplace as a condition of that state's citizens receiving federal subsidies to purchase health insurance policies through the marketplace. 

Pence ruled out Indiana establishing a state health marketplace, also known as an exchange, in one of his first pronouncements after winning election in November 2012. The Republican-controlled General Assembly similarly has refused to create an Indiana insurance marketplace. 

The governor has said he has no interest in reversing that action even though approximately 118,000 Hoosiers now receiving health insurance subsidies, worth on average $4,000 each, will lose that money — and likely their health insurance — and may even have to pay back past subsidies, if Pence's argument prevails at the Supreme Court. 

"I stand by our decision not to establish a state-based exchange in Indiana," Pence said. "The truth is, I think that ordering every American to purchase health insurance — whether they want it, or need it or not — was the wrong idea to begin with, and I think Obamacare should be repealed." . . .

These people are playing with people's lives. I realize they care more about what the billionaire Koch brothers think about them than what average Hoosiers struggling to survive think, but to take away a benefit from Hoosiers conferred upon other Americans by virtue of this law because of their ideological opposition to it is asinine and cruelty beyond thought. Both of these men and their families have received free health care courtesy of the taxpayers most of their adult lives. They have no clue how difficult it is to find affordable health care coverage. I get sick and tired of them pretending to support Christian values and then pushing public policy outcomes that could not possibly be more cruel and arbitrary. The fact is that the whole system fails if this law is not made to work. There is no free marketplace any more in the health insurance market, and there hasn't been for a long time. If these men get their way, they are dealing the death penalty to people who have no other choices left and simply want to live with the security of having health care coverage.

On the congressional front, House Republicans passed legislation sponsored by Indiana's U.S. Rep. Todd Young to move the definition of full-time employment from 30 to 40 hours under the ACA, another change favored by the billionaire elites the members of Congress serve. Democratic Sen. Joe Donnelly, who is controlled by the same group of billionaires, plans to sponsor the legislation in the Senate. The lower hourly requirement was imposed because lawmakers knew greedy, larger employers would simply reduce their workers' hours below the 40-hour threshold to evade the requirements under the law. So these people want to allow large employers to stop providing health insurance to employees working any less than 40 hours a week, which is the new reality for many in the workplace. And if Pence and Zoeller get their way, those same Hoosiers without insurance won't be able to afford to buy their own insurance because the policies offered in the workplace without subsidies aren't affordable. Whatever happened to the Contract With America where Republicans pledged to live under the same laws under which all other Americans are required to live?