On the hook due to ACA

The Affordable Care Act has cost taxpayers a bundle, and now the Supreme Court says they are on the hook for billions of dollars in additional payments to insurers even though Congress never appropriated the money. The ruling will be even more expensive if it encourages more lawsuit demands for unappropriated funds from other statutes.

That’s the meaning of Monday’s 8-1 ruling upholding payments to health insurers for so-called risk corridors in ObamaCare’s first three years (Maine Community Health Options v. U.S.). …

Congress writes laws all the time that authorize payments for this or that purpose only to decide later to appropriate less money or none at all in any given year. The appropriation power controls in the end, and the Constitution says no money shall be spent unless Congress appropriates it. The executive has no power to spend money without Congressional approval, as Democrats have been lecturing us about

President Trump’s “emergency” spending for the Mexico border wall.

Let’s hope the Court is reading this as a narrow one-time exception to its implied-right wariness. As Chief Justice John Roberts well knows, ObamaCare seems to invite legal exceptions and invented jurisprudence. Justice Alito strikes us as having the stronger legal argument, but the majority doesn’t agree and now taxpayers will pay for another ObamaCare provision that had to pass before we found out what was really in it.