Lawyer Put Health Act in Peril by Pointing Out 4 Little Words

The New York Times reports:

The first lawsuits challenging the Affordable Care Act were still in the early stages, but conservative lawyers were already working on a backup plan in December 2010 if the first line of attack failed.

It was Thomas M. Christina, an employment benefits lawyer from Greenville, S.C., who found a new vulnerability in the sprawling law. “I noticed something peculiar about the tax credit,” he told a gathering of strategists at the American Enterprise Institute.

With a rudimentary PowerPoint presentation, Mr. Christina sketched a new line of argument. He pointed to four previously unnoticed words in the health care law, enacted nine months earlier. 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.”

The New York Times' haunting fear.