FREDERICKSBURG, Va. — Millions of people are waiting anxiously for theSupreme Court to decide the fate of President Obama’s health care law with a ruling this month on health insurance subsidies. But David M. King, a plaintiff in the case, is not among them.
Mr. King, 64, said recently that he was reasonably confident he would prevail in his challenge to the subsidies, a central element of the Affordable Care Act.
“We have a good chance of winning,” he said in an interview at his home here.
Mr. King and three other Virginia residents are challenging the payment of subsidies in states like Virginia that depend on the federal insurance marketplace. They contend that the 2010 health care law allows subsidies only in states that establish their own marketplaces.
But Mr. King said that he was not really worried about the outcome of the case, King v. Burwell, because as a Vietnam veteran, he has access to medical care through the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Now it out of proportion and claim that eight million people will lose their health insurance.” But he said lawyers had assured him that “things are in play to take care of the problem.”
Mr. King did not provide details, and supporters of the health care law have said that there are no quick or easy solutions if the Supreme Court rules against it. The president could not simply give out subsidies if the court stripped them away, so the critical decisions about how to respond “would sit with Congress and the states,” said Sylvia Mathews Burwell, the secretary of health and human services.
Millions of people receive federal subsidies in the form of tax credits to help them pay premiums, and without such assistance, many would not be able to afford insurance.
Mr. King, a gruff but friendly man who likes to guard his privacy, expressed a generalized sense of grievance over the health care law and the way the administration had carried it out.
The name often used for the program, Obamacare, is enough to upset anyone, Mr. King said, and suggests that the president is “a narcissist.” (The term was actually coined by opponents of the law, though Mr. Obama has sometimes used it.)
Mr. King said that although he did not attend the arguments on the case in early March, he had listened to the audio. “A lot of the Supreme Court seemed to be in our favor,” he said, and he offered contrasting impressions of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
“I thought Roberts was supportive,” Mr. King said. “Ginsburg was not. She is far left.”
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