It is just there to get new House members on the record regarding ACA.
That seems an above-board way to do things. Much more transparent and better for public confidence in "the process" than bottling up a bill in Committee so that members aren't forced/allowed to go on the record.
Regarding the lawsuits: I think too much is being made of them and the threat they pose to the ACA. If it is found that Federal exchanges don't qualify for the subsidy, then there will tremendous public pressure in those states to "deem" them to be state exchanges and slap the various logos of the state on the web sites. The federal government will sell the infrastructure for running things to the states for a dollar and it will be a done deal. I don't think, at this point, that the opposition to ACA in
any state has the ability to resist the force of voters who have had their "free" subsidies for a year and now want to keep them. In this respect, the drafters of this law were 100% correct in their estimation of the political dynamics. Businesses and individuals in those states will be subject the mandates once the state governments accept the exchanges.
The only way I see around this, for ACA opponents, is if the electorate in these states sees the cost/benefit of the forced health insurance purchases to >still< be a bad deal even after the subsidies. The opposition might be able to pick off enough votes by offering a non-compulsory statewide alternative to the federal ACA, but this would have all the known problems with adverse selection, etc that have plagued other similar attempts to provide noncompulsory community-rated health insurance.
And if the SCOTUS
rejects the lawsuits, then things continue much as they have been. In that case, maybe states with exchanges will eventually pass the responsibility back to the federal government--it's just an expensive administrative burden, and there's so little latitude in how states run them that they might as well just pass it back to DC rather than serve as admin clerks for Washington.
"We must keep the ACA" and "we must repeal the ACA" are both overly simplistic bumper-sticker slogans useful for fundraising and "rallying the base", but not much else. The fact that ACA was voted in (kinda) does not make it immune to modification or outright repeal. Whatever its merits, a law that was publicly unpopular from day 1 and which would not even have won approval in the legislature by the time it was signed into law is not a prime candidate to reamain unchanged. There's no permanent, immutable "law of the land" in the US, thank goodness. We need something better than what existed before
and better than this thing we have now. Politicians should get busy on that. As we've seen, it ain't easy.