At Politico:

The next shot in the legal war over the health reform law isn’t another lawsuit but an academic paper that says federal exchanges can’t give people subsidies to help pay for their coverage.

The paper, authored by Case Western Reserve University’s Jonathan Adler and the Cato Institute’s Michael Cannon, puts intellectual heft behind an argument that has been percolating among the law’s opponents. …

Based on an analysis of the debate on the Senate bill — which became the basis of the law — and the legislative proposals that preceded it, they claim — Congress made a decision to build the law based on state cooperation. The federal government-run exchanges were meant as a “fallback, and were not intended to replace state-run exchanges.”

In fact, they write, Congress intentionally did not give the federal exchanges the power to administer subsidies because it wanted these dollars to be a sweetener to persuade states to set up exchanges themselves.

Read more: ACA opponents want to kill law via subsidies.

Adler & Cannon’s paper: Taxation Without Representation: The Illegal IRS Rule to Expand Tax Credits Under the PPACA

via Heartland Consumer Power Report