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King V Burwell Case Analysis

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The article revolves around U.S. Supreme Court verdict in the case King v. Burwell, 576 U.S. ___ (2015), wherein through a 6-3 decision it upheld the provision of tax subsidies to qualifying people under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) not only in states with their own exchanges but also in the states with the federal marketplace. The plaintiffs in King had filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia challenging the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) rule that federal tax credit is available to all financially eligible Americans whether they purchase insurance from a state exchange or a federal exchange, arguing that ACA (colloquially Obamacare) authorized tax credits only for those who purchased insurances from state exchanges. The attorneys who had represented the plaintiffs in King also brought a similar lawsuit in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia (“King v. Burwell (U.S. Sup. Ct.) | Constitutional Accountability Center,” n.d.). The District …show more content…

Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council Inc. 467 U.S. 837, 842-843 (1984), the Supreme Court had ruled that regulatory authority may be delegated to an agency by the U.S Congress and the agency’s regulations would carry the weight of law subject to passing of the two-part “Chevron test” according to which if the Congress does not directly speak to the precise question at issue as evaluated by the court and if the statute remains silent or ambiguous on the specific issue, the issue for the court would be whether the agency’s answer is based on a permissible construction of the statute. Based on the Fourth Circuit’s ruling, the statutory language had been ambiguous and therefore the IRS’ regulatory ruling would be given deference. The Supreme Court in its majority ruling however considered this test to have been failed since it believed that had the Congress wished to assign that question to the agency, it would have done so

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