Obamacare’s final test: if it survives the Supreme Court, it’s here to stay
By Sarah Kliff
Vox, June 15, 2015
In the next two weeks, the Supreme Court will rule in King v. Burwell, a challenge that threatens to dismantle Obamacare by ending financial subsidies for 6.4 million Americans.
If the challengers win, it would throw the health-care law into chaos. But if the White House prevails, something equally momentous will have occurred: President Obama’s signature legislative accomplishment will actually, really, definitely be here to stay.
“If we win this, I think that’s major, and I’d call it a monumental step,” says Ron Pollack, executive director of the pro-Obamacare advocacy group Families USA. “It means that the ACA is a permanent part of the American health-care system.”
http://www.vox.com/2015/6/15/8779143/obamacare-repeal-dead-supreme-court
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Will Inefficient Financial Healthcare Reform Kill the ACA?
By Jacqueline DiChiara
RevCycleIntelligence, June 15, 2015
Is the Affordable Care Act (ACA) hurling the healthcare industry further into the red? The answer is a definite yes, according to a recent RevCycleIntelligence.com article about key findings from a pair of Harvard Medical School professors’ Health Affairs blog study.
The bureaucracy will gobble up a quarter of federal spending; the ACA will add almost $274 billion in new administrative costs heading into 2022, well beyond what would have been expected had the ACA not been passed, maintain David U. Himmelstein, MD and Steffie Woolhandler, MD.
“Previous work we’ve done suggests that a third of the total healthcare dollar goes to paperwork and bureaucracy,” Himmelstein states. Such numbers are likely mere underestimates that require updating, he confirms.
“Most other nations are much more efficient in the way that they finance and administer healthcare,” Himmelstein confirms. “There is no reason, other than political difficulty, that we can’t shed massive bureaucratic costs.”
Himmelstein predicts the ACA will soon lose dominance within the healthcare industry, moving forward. “Instead of fighting about whether to go back to an old system, repealing the ACA,” he says, “the debate will turn to how we move from here to something different, hopefully better.”
“Costs are likely to resume an upward growth pattern and more and more people are going to find themselves grossly underinsured. All of those problems are going to be part of the debate very soon,” he says. “We are moving to a handful of giant organizations controlling the health delivery system, largely focusing on their own interests and giving lip service to wanting to serve patients, but really acting like corporate masters of the healthcare system and shaping it to do what they want rather than what patients need,” he maintains.
The simple solution is to implement national health insurance, Himmelstein maintains. “Is it appropriate that some private organization have the decision making power over the healthcare of the vast majority in that region?” he asks. “Privatization is much less efficient,” Himmelstein states. “We’ll again be coming to a debate about national health insurance.”
http://revcycleintelligence.com/news/will-inefficient-financial-healthcare-reform-kill-the-aca
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Comment:
By Don McCanne, MD
Everywhere you turn these days there is rampant speculation on what the impact will be of the soon-to-be-released Supreme Court decision on King v. Burwell – the case on whether or not subsidies can be provided to enrollees in federal ACA insurance exchanges. In the long run, the outcome doesn’t matter.
As David Himmelstein (co-founder of PNHP) explains in the RevCycleIntelligence article above, “Costs are likely to resume an upward growth pattern and more and more people are going to find themselves grossly underinsured,” and “Instead of fighting about whether to go back to an old system, repealing the ACA, the debate will turn to how we move from here to something different, hopefully better.” Regardless of the King v. Burwell outcome, “We’ll again be coming to a debate about national health insurance.”
It’s absolutely inevitable.