How Obama could skirt the Halbig lawsuit to kill ObamaCare

The specifics would need to be worked out, but the crux is this: States could continue to use HealthCare.gov as their technical backdrop, but they would be considered state-based exchanges. That would allow the law’s tax subsidies to keep flowing, even if the Supreme Court were to invalidate them on the federal exchange, as the lawsuit’s plaintiffs argue it should.

“I imagine the administration would try to make it as easy as possible for states to set up exchanges, possibly including having the nuts and bolts still operated through HealthCare.gov,” Larry Levitt, vice president at the non-partisan Kaiser Family Foundation, told TPM this summer before the case reached the Supreme Court.

Joel Ario, a former Health and Human Services official who nows works at Manatt, Phelps and Phillips, also told TPM back then that the administration “could make it much easier for a second generation of state exchanges to be established now that the federal government has a viable IT platform for both state and federal exchanges to use.”