If King is upheld, what will Congress do?

Congressional Republicans, who have promised and failed to come up with a legislative alternative to the Affordable Care Act for five years, are now promising that they will have a replacement ready in case the Supreme Court upholds the plaintiffs  this June in King v. Burwell.  Here's Reuters:

Representative Tom Price, Republican chairman of the House Budget Committee, told a conservative forum that the high court's anticipated ruling in the case known as King v. Burwell could cause President Barack Obama's signature domestic policy to unravel quickly.

"We need to be ready, willing and able to move forward," said Price, a leading Obamacare critic who replaced Wisconsin Republican Paul Ryan as House Budget Committee chairman earlier this year.

“We believe we are going to get to that point. I believe the president is actually going to be open to a better way,” he added.

A ruling for the plaintiff in King would leave the body of the law intact, albeit in a vegetative state. The exchanges would still exist, though they would be completely dysfunctional in the states covered by Healthcare.gov. Governors and legislatures in those states would be responsible either for finding a way to continue to subsidize the premiums of tens or hundreds of thousands of state residents who have accessed coverage through Healthcare.gov, or for justifying the denial of subsidies to those residents.

Because the law would still be on the books, there is nothing to force the administration to negotiate a full "replacement" that would entail repeal (as in "repeal and replace"). That leaves the question: Are there possible amendments that would meet Republicans' alleged policy goals without shredding the ACA's coverage grant?  Under pressure of abruptly withdrawing coverage from 8 million Americans, is compromise conceivable?

The ACA offers catastrophic coverage: the AP notices!

For almost two weeks, I have been beating a drum, waving a flag, screaming from the bleachers that justices Alito, Roberts and Scalia seemed unaware of a fundamental feature of the Affordable Care Act (and were not disabused during oral argument on 3/27): the ACA has a catastrophic coverage option.  All three seemed convinced that the mandate requires individuals to buy more coverage than many people will ever need, such as substance abuse treatment, and that the young were being exploited as "golden geese" to subsidize the cost of covering older citizens.

My focus was on provisions in the ACA, Section 1302 (e), allowing those under 30 and others who could show financial hardship to buy purely catastrophic coverage. Now, the AP's Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar is out with a story* citing several experts who assert that the bronze plans to be offered in the insurance exchanges, available to all, are also essentially catastrophic coverage plans -- though that definition is contested. Those calling it catastrophic focus mainly on the percentage of costs covered:

Verrilli, slapped silly, recovers willy-nilly

I read rather than listened to the Supreme Court pleadings on the individual mandate yesterday, so I missed all the cues of body language and tone. Maybe that's why  I think that Solicitor General Verrilli is getting something of a bad rap in the lethal post-mortems.  (I'll also cop to being biased in favor of those under attack.)

To a degree, I suspect that critics are projecting their own discomfort and shock at the apparent intense hostility to the mandate expressed by Scalia, Roberts and Alito at the outset onto Verrilli, concluding that he buckled under the pressure of hostile questioning. Maybe he did look and sound ill at ease -- the play's the thing, not the script. But if  he did not answer this point or that point at the particular moment when one critic or another thought appropriate, it was in large part because he was repeatedly interrupted.  Ironically, some of the interventions by Ginsburg and Breyer may have diverted him an early answer to the core question: what was his "limiting principle, " a line the federal federal government could not cross while exercising its power to regulate interstate commerce.

By my count, Verrilli was interrupted 44 times in 50 pages of testimony.  Plaintiff's counsel Paul Clement, who was more fluent, was interrupted just 12 times in 24 pages. Clement's co-counsel Michael Carvin was interrupted at a rate similar to Verrilli -- 25 times in 27 pages. But the intensity in the two halves of the proceeding was reversed:  the liberal justices got in the groove of defending the mandate near the end of the proceeding, while Verrilli was buzz-sawed most intensely at the outset -- 16 times in the 15 pages following his opening statement. 

It therefore took him a while to spit out the core points. But he did get them out. The fractured early focus was the basis of much criticism -- for example, Noah Feldman's: