The Internal Revenue Service is beginning to promulgate regulations to implement the tax-related provisions of the Affordable Care Act (aka “ObamaCare”). A proposed rule issued last month provides that eligible taxpayers may receive tax credits for the purchase of qualifying health insurance plans established by states under Section 1311 or by the federal government under Section 1321. The only problem is that this is not consistent with the actual text of the statute passed by Congress.
ACA Section 1401 provides that eligible taxpayers may receive income tax credits for purchase of insurance “through an Exchange established by the State under Section 1311.” Section 1311 calls upon states to establish health insurance exchanges. It does not provide for the federal government to create health care exchanges. Rather, a separate provision of the act, Section 1321, provides that if a state does not “elect” to create an exchange that meets federal requirements, the federal government shall then “establish and operate” an exchange. Thus, under a plain reading of the text, the ACA only provides for tax credits for state-run exchanges, and if states fail to create exchanges, there are no tax credits for insurance bought on a federally run exchange.
This is potentially significant for several reasons. The individual mandate requires all Americans to purchase health insurance. Even if the mandate is successful at reducing adverse selection, health insurance premiums are still expected to rise due to other provisions in the law. Higher premiums could make it difficult for many Americans to comply with the mandate. For this reason, Congress not only called upon states to create exchanges, it also authorized tax credits to offset the cost of health insurance premiums for those with incomes between 100 and 400 percent of the poverty level. But if these tax credits are only available for insurance purchased through state-based exchanges, many will be left high-and-dry in states that don’t create their own exchanges — and this could be a big problem. According to one recent report, only ten states had passed legislation to create qualifying exchanges through August 2011. (See also here.)
As David Hogberg reports in IBD, this has led some to believe the limitation of tax credits to state-based exchanges is a mistake. Under this theory, Congress meant to provide tax credits for any exchange-purchased insurance, because Congress wanted lower-income individuals to be able to purchase health insurance (and comply with the mandate). This may be true. As Vanderbilt’s James Blumstein tells IBD (and I discussed in this paper), the exchange-related provisions of the law were not written all-that-carefully. Nonetheless, federal agencies lack the authority to unilaterally revise statutory mistakes. (A point Cato’s Michael Cannon also makes here.) Congress may have wanted to make tax credits more widely available — just as it may have wanted those making less than poverty-level income to be eligible for exchanges as well — but that is not what Congress did.
The IRS may be inclined to argue that the failure to include a reference to federally run exchanges or Section 1321 in Section 1401 was a “scrivener’s error” that should be disregarded. But this is a difficult argument to make in this case for several reasons. First, a “scrivener’s error” is supposed to be that – a purely clerical error that could be attributed to a failed transcription or something of that sort. An example would be mistaking the relevant subsection in a statutory cross-reference – say mistaking “(i)” for “(ii)” or “Section 36B(B)(I)(b)” for “Section 36(B)(I)(b),” or screwing up punctuation. The alleged error here is more significant, however. Not only did Congress forget to include any reference to Section 1321, it also expressly stated that the tax credits were for insurance purchased through “an Exchange established by the State.” So a legislator reviewing the relevant language could not claim that they did not realize the statutory cross-reference excluded federal exchanges because the clear text of the statute does as well. In other words, any legislator who actually bothered to read the bill before voting would have seen the limitation.
Another problem for the “scrivener’s error” argument is that it is usually dependent on showing that it is implausible, and not merely unlikely, that the statutory provisions were a mistake. As the Supreme Court explained in U.S. Nat. Bank of Oregon v. Independent Ins. Agents of America, Inc., 508 U.S. 439 (1993), this will be shown in the “unusual” case in which there is “overwhelming evidence from the structure, language, and subject matter of the law” that Congress could not have consciously adopted the language in the statute. Similarly, in Appalachian Power Co. v. EPA, 249 F.3d 1032 (D.C. Cir. 2001), the D.C. Circuit explained that:
We will not . . . invoke this rule to ratify an interpretation that abrogates the enacted statutory text absent an extraordinarily convincing justification because . . . the court’s role is not to correct the text so that it better serves the statute’s purposes, for it is the function of the political branches not only to define the goals but also to choose the means for reaching them. . . . Therefore, for the [agency] to avoid a literal interpretation . . ., it must show either that, as a matter of historical fact, Congress did not mean what it appears to have said, or that, as a matter of logic and statutory structure, it almost surely could not have meant it. [internal quotations and citations omitted]
Given what’s in the ACA, this is a showing that the IRS and HHS would have a hard time making. While it is certainly plausible – perhaps even likely – that many in Congress wanted tax credits for the purchase of health insurance to be broadly available, there is also ample evidence that the ACA was designed to induce states to create exchanges of their own. For example, Section 1311 directs states to create exchanges. Further, as Blumstein notes, under the ACA the federal government could sue to force a state to create an exchange. As in other policy areas, the federal government can’t force states to comply, so it uses a combination of positive and negative incentives – in this case, subsidies for creating exchanges and the threat of a federally run exchange if a state does not create one on its own. In this context, limiting the availability of tax credits to insurance purchased in state-run exchanges can be seen as just an added inducement. Much like the Clean Air Act threatens states with the loss of highway funds if they fail to adopt sufficiently stringent pollution control programs, the ACA as written threatens states with the loss of tax credits for state residents if they do not create an exchange. Such a policy may not be wise or fair – and may undermine the goal of getting more people insured – but it takes far more than that to justify ignoring a statute’s plain text.
Neither the IRS nor HHS has addressed these concerns as far as I’m aware, nor has anyone else. I’ll certainly do a follow-up post if such arguments are out there. I noted that the ACA’s text limits subsidies to state exchanges at a conference on health care reform and the states last fall, and no one suggested I was in error, but that does not mean I am right. It’s also possible there’s some other overlooked provision of the ACA that could be used to solve this problem. If so, I couldn’t find it, but I’ll also post an update if such a provision is found. In the meantime, the limitation of tax credits to those who purchase their insurance in state-run exchanges could be unwelcome news to those in the majority of states yet to create exchanges of their own.
I should also note that I have not addressed what would happen if the IRS were to just go ahead and finalize regulations providing for tax credits beyond those authorized by the ACA’s text. Under such a scenario, standing to challenge the IRS’ action in court would certainly be a big issue. As a general matter, there is no standing for a taxpayer to challenge a tax benefit conferred upon someone else. But the IRS, like all federal agencies, has an independent obligation to comply with the law, and I do not know of anyone who has argued that the IRS may create tax credits at will just because it thinks that’s what Congress meant to do and such actions are not easily challengable in court. Just imagine the sorts of mischief such a doctrine could unleash.