Any time you read about a major court case striking down a law, or some statue, you will typically see it accompanied with a very painstaking argument about how the judiciary cannot and must not simply change or reinterpret what is perceived to be a "broken" law. They can follow the law as it is written, or they can strike it down as unconstitutional, but they can never simply say, "I don't like the effect this law would have here, so I will just ignore it."
This is like a compiler simply ignoring explicit and functional lines of code because they lead to a crash. It might sound great that the program avoids a crash, but if the program isn't running it's own code anymore, then what code is it running?
In this case, the prevailing argument was that the law as written would destroy so much of what had evolved into regulatory practice so that they couldn't bear to hold the Executive to its own rules. As you can imagine, this is a difficult precedent to set because it opens up an impossible hole in the innermost workings of the system design. I'm not a historian on this subject so I can't really point to previous examples, but my understanding is the only "proper" fix here is an act of congress, and Scotus is rightly peeved to be put in the position where the executive branch is asking them to clear up a mess like this.
Another way to think of it -- it is congress's fundamental duty to write and vote on the bills, and executive branch's duty to sign them into law. The judicial must not and cannot write their own laws, no matter how much another branch might plead with them to do so in order to get them off the hook of actually doing their job. If the judiciary can rewrite laws that don't suit the executive, it negates congress by giving the executive and judiciary branch far too much power. To those who say it was necessary in this case, just "be careful what you wish for."
This is a mischaracterization of the action the court took on this case. The court did not 'write their own law' -- they forced the legislature to follow what was obviously the intent of the law despite "inartful wording."
"John McDonough, who worked on the Health, Education, Labor and Pension committee during the health reform debate, wrote in an email. 'There is not a scintilla of evidence that the Democratic lawmakers who designed the law intended to deny subsidies to any state, regardless of exchange status.'" [0]
Your solution -- forcing Congress to "do their job" and fix this typo of a mistake -- would come at the cost of the system itself as well as the healthcare of more than 8m people. Such pedantry is not only unwarranted, but cruel.
[0]http://www.vox.com/2014/7/23/5927169/halbig-says-congress-me...
"and in the American system of democracy, legislative questions are decided by the Supreme Court."
