This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, February 4th, 2015. I'm Caleb Brown.

As the Obamacare lawsuit known as King V Burwell goes to the Supreme Court, I sat down with one of the

godfathers of the case, Jonathan Adler, to talk about what people need to know ahead of the

oral argument scheduled for March 4th.

The most important thing to get out is that this case is not much of a constitutional matter at all.

Right.

It's a statutory case.

It's a case that's about executive power.

It's a case that's about how you read a statute. It's a case that's about whether or not if Congress passes a law that in retrospect it decides

was not written the way Congress or the administration would have liked can the administration just

rewrite it and in order to serve the administration's policy preferences and in this particular case the law was quite

conscious an imperfect unfinished law was quite consciously enacted and

whether or not that licenses the executive branch to fill in the gaps to their

liking.

All right, well let's start from the beginning.

So this case is really deals with the Affordable Care Act which delegated to states the authority to decide

whether or not to create a state-run exchange and if they did not the federal government would create an

exchange for them so what difference does that make?

Well if one reads the statute one of the differences it

makes is that tax credits and cost sharing subsidies for the purchase of

qualifying health insurance is available in exchanges that are established by a state, but there's no provision of the law that makes such tax credits or cost sharing subsidies

available in exchanges that are established by the federal government.

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