If the Supreme Court so decides, however, that won’t really end Obamacare. Rather, it would essentially end Obamacare in red states. But it would survive in blue states.

That’s essentially what the Court gave us in 2012 when it took it upon itself to rewrite and save the statute by declaring that states had the constitutional right to opt-out of expanding Medicaid—the government-run insurance program for the poor—to cover the near-poor with incomes up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level. As a result, the Medicaid expansion—along with the exchanges designed to help those above that threshold afford private coverage—went ahead in Democratic states. States under Republican control, for the most part, turned the deal down. The nation thus began a striking experiment in federalism, in which, basically, liberal states will get the more-or-less liberal idea of healthcare reform and conservative states will get to stick with less government and the pre-Obama healthcare system everyone loved so much. Somewhere down the road, we’ll get to see who’s happier.

States that rejected Obamacare also chose not to set up their own exchanges, so, under the law, the federal government set up exchanges for them. If the Obamacare challengers win in King v. Burwell, nothing will change in blue states—but red states, which already rejected coverage for the near-poor, can say sayonara as well to middle-class subsidies.

This has struck fear into the hearts of not just the law’s supporters, but also, belatedly, those of many Republicans. The reason is simple: Many middleclass families (and thus likely voters) will see their insurance costs skyrocket, heading into an election year, for reasons wholly attributable to conservative opposition to Obamacare. As a result, Republican leaders in Congress have been scrambling in recent weeks to make clear that they won’t leave these voters (and their insurance companies) without some form of subsidy. While the easy fix would simply be to clarify in statute that the subsidy language is intended to apply to federal as well as state exchanges, that would be too, well, Obama. So congressional Republicans have proposed several variants that, essentially, provide some similar form of subsidy, but not too much, and not for too long (basically, just until they can get past the 2016 elections).

The story is more complex at the state level. Some believe that exchanges collapsing in two-thirds of the states will cause the system to implode everywhere. But this is unlikely given that insurance rates are set on a state-by-basis, even on federally-run exchanges. A “death spiral” in one state—in which healthier consumers opt-out of high-priced coverage, leaving only sicker ones who push the cost even higher—shouldn’t affect the viability of the market in other states. Perhaps even more importantly, many of the states in question are already planning to institute their own state-run exchanges, if the Court requires them to do so in order to preserve subsidies for their citizens. That underscores the fact that opposition to Obamacare is at least as much about objecting to Obama as objecting on any real policy basis.