In which the Tea Party throws their own members under the bus.

Monday's New York Times has a pretty thorough look at just what the "establish an exchange" status is across the various states which would otherwise have millions of people devastated by the impact of the GOP's King v. Burwell court case, which will be decided on either Thursday, Friday or next Monday (most likely Friday now, as I understand it).

They cover the three states which already have a "federally-assisted" state-based exchange (Oregon, Nevada, New Mexico); Hawaii, which is in the process of moving to that status; the two states which are hoping to do so next year (Delaware and Pennsylvania)...as well as the other 32 states which don't have bupkis at the moment.

But in the vast majority of states that rely on the federal exchange, HealthCare.gov, there is little or no evidence that anyone has a plan to preserve the subsidies that help more than six million residents of those states afford their insurance premiums. Most of the affected states have Republican governors, and many, including Scott Walker of Wisconsin, Rick Scott of Florida and Dennis Daugaard of South Dakota, insist it is Congress’s job to come up with a remedy if the subsidies disappear.

It's a long and comprehensive article, although for the most part it just confirms that few of them listened to anything I've been warning about since December:

In other words, every one of the following states--along with the other 2 dozen not already running their own exchanges--should be running, not walking towards at least getting their ducks in a row in case SCOTUS lowers the boom...and instead, every damned one of them appears to have decided to twiddle their thumbs for the next 6 months or so.

However, there's one passage near the end of the NY Times piece which caught my eye:

Levi Russell, a spokesman for Americans for Prosperity, said the group would “be involved one way or another.” But he also said he believed predictions of voter backlash over lost subsidies were overblown, noting that only a sliver of the voting population would be affected. Most Americans get health insurance through work and do not have to buy their own.

“For every one person getting a subsidy,” Mr. Russell said, “there’s probably another three or four who are paying for that subsidy, which is contributing to the growing cost of health care. So I think it’s off base to say there will be panic and rioting in the streets.”

Wow. Just...wow.

Russell, spokesman for "Americans for Prosperity", aka the Koch Brothers, aka the Tea Party, is literally saying that he honestly doesn't give a rat's ass about 6-7 million people having their economic and medical well-being effectively destroyed (and an additional 6-7 million likely facing exorbitant rate hikes as a result) since it presumably won't impact him personally (unless, of course, he ever loses his job as a Koch Brothers shill, I presume).

I suppose this might be understandable (still disgusting, but understandable) if the vast majority of those millions of people were Democrats, but every bit of demographic data available says that:

The people who could lose their health insurance as a result of a Supreme Court decision this year are predominantly white, Southern, employed and middle-aged, according to an Urban Institute analysis.

Gee, who does that description fit? Yup, that's right: The Tea Party is openly and deliberately giving the finger to their own members...just so long as they don't hurt enough of them for Republicans to actually lose the election next year.