Monday, March 02, 2015

Five Little Words: An Epiphany

"Exchange established by the State under 1311"

I've always believed the adage that "words mean things;" that is, words have meaning and one should be careful in how they're used. Sometimes, silence is golden: not speaking can communicate better than words.

In the original series opening of Star Trek, William Shatner speaks of the ship's "5 year mission." That always struck me as self-limiting: what if it had been picked up for a 6th season? Would Captain Kirk have become Captain Steubing?

Likewise, in The Next Generation, Patrick Stewart calls it an "on-going mission," an unnecessary redundancy. How much more sense it would have made to just say - in both shows - "its mission,"  no qualifier needed.

And so it is with the subsidies. The whole of Section 1311 refers to "each State" and "a State" over and over; if Congress had truly wanted subsidies available for everyone whose income justified it, why not just say so? It would have been simple enough: "... enrolled in through an Exchange established  under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act."

Easy peasy.

That they chose to specify Exchanges established by a "State"  means something. Words matter.
blog comments powered by Disqus