When the Supreme Court, in 2012, refused to strike the statute down, the opponents didn't stop there. The charge to their allies, which came from a high-profile 2010 meeting at the American Enterprise Institute, was to adopt a strategy designed to "exploit" "bits and pieces" of the law, calling it a "bastard [that] has to be killed as a matter of political hygiene." That birthed the second Supreme Court case, one that attempted to take advantage of four sloppily drafted words in the 2,000-page law to argue - impossibly - that Congress never intended for the subsidies essential for all the ACA's insurance reforms function to apply to the federal insurance exchanges. The Supreme Court quashed that suit too, in a definitive 6-3 smack-down, but not before the uncertainty caused by the suit prevented a smooth implementation.