Too much of a dog for even these guys.
Perhaps the Supreme Court has been feeling enough heat for taking on the very dubious
King v. Burwell Obamacare case. Or maybe they feel like they've got one Obamacare-killing case before them, why bother taking a second. At any rate, they've
rejected an appeal from plaintiffs challenging the fictitious "death panels" in the law.
The high court left intact a ruling by the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that threw out the lawsuit. […]
In the case that the justices rejected on Monday, Arizona-based business owner Nick Coons and Dr. Eric Novack, an orthopedic surgeon, sued in 2011 in litigation backed by a conservative legal group.
Among other things, they challenged the Independent Payment Advisory Board, or IPAB, a 15-member government panel dubbed by some Republicans as a "death panel" because of its intended role in trimming costs within Medicare, the government healthcare program for the elderly and disabled.
The case was thrown out by the lower court which determined that Coons and Novack did not have standing to sue—they couldn't show that the IPAB was doing them any harm. That's because the IPAB hasn't even been triggered yet, so they haven't seen their Medicare payments cut. It actually will only kick in if Medicare spending increases reach a threshold that's not likely to be hit in the next five years. In fact, Medicare spending under Obamacare has slowed to the point that the threshold might not be met in the foreseeable future. There's no way Medicare physicians could be harmed by a provision of the law that is, for the time being, essentially theoretical.
So now we know there is an Obamacare challenge ridiculous enough for the Supreme Court to reject. We won't know what this portends for the King challenge to the subsidies in the law—if anything—until the court hands down its ruling in June.