Report: HHS Waffled On Federal Obamacare Subsidies Question

The Daily Caller discusses Scot Vorse's research on the ACA:

"The Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Scot Vorse has published a timeline of the Department of Health and Human Services’ preparation for Obamacare’s launch over the past several years. Interestingly enough, while HHS quickly began work on getting state-run exchanges to offer subsidies, it doesn’t appear that the agency did the same with HealthCare.gov, suggesting it may have not initially believed it was allowed to.

The question is more pertinent that ever. A number of lawsuits charging that Obamacare restricts subsidies to state-based exchanges only, and that the IRS is illegally handing out taxpayer dollars on HealthCare.gov, have proceeded quickly through the court system. The Supreme Court will hear one such case, King v. Burwell, next session.

“Official documents show that while HHS moved quickly after the ACA’s enactment to help state governments make tax credits available through state-based exchanges, for nearly two years, it developed its HealthCare.gov website without any effort to offer tax credits on the federal exchange,” Vorse wrote in the CEI report.

…

CEI, of course, does have a horse in this race: it’s coordinating and funding two of the most prominent lawsuits, Halbig v. Burwell and King v. Burwell, which the Supreme Court will hear next year. But the timeline again raises doubts about what the Obama administration knew and when."