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For the second week in a row, I am reading about the newest challenge to The Affordable Care Act, King v. Burwell. Oral arguments will be held in The Supreme Court today; on Monday, Katrina vanden Heuvel wrote a piece for The Nation uncovering the major financiers of the attack on the health care law, the Koch brothers. As vanden Heuvel explains, the brothers have been battling the ACA for years:
The Kochs and their affiliated groups spent vast sums to try to stop the Affordable Care Act from passing in the first place; to unseat those that backed the law over the course of several election cycles; and more recently, to stymie the law’s implementation (e.g., killing Medicaid expansion in Tennessee last month). And the influence of the Koch network pervades nearly every part of the challengers’ case in King v. Burwell.
The theory behind the plaintiff’s case was hatched by lawyers at a conference for the American Enterprise Institute, a think-tank that is not only funded by the Koch brothers but with which David Koch holds a leadership position. Another Koch-backed (and very similarly named) organization, Competitive Enterprise Institute, is “coordinating and funding…the King v. Burwell case.” The bottom line, vanden Heuvel says, is that a great deal of the Kochs widespread resources are fusing together in this effort to gut Obamacare:
Thus, much of the financial and legal muscle behind King v. Burwell directly traces back to Koch Industries. …All told, Koch influence informs about half of the twenty-one briefs filed on the anti-ACA side, and a little more than half if you don’t count the briefs from states and elected officials. The petitioner might be ‘King’ in body, but it’s Koch in heart, mind, spirit—and bank account.
— Drew Whitcup, Zeteo Contributing Writer
