Sunday, May 24, 2015

What Might Happen if Obamacare's "King vs. Burwell" Challenge Is Upheld?

 
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act has only been in force since Jan. 1, 2014, but it's had some amazing ups and downs in its short history.
Known better as Obamacare, the PPACA struggled out of the gate to enroll uninsured consumers due to a host of IT-architectural design issues underlying a number of state- and federally run marketplace exchanges. It took more than two months for permanent fixes to be put into place on the federally run exchange, Healthcare.gov, allowing consumers to finally complete the sign-up process for health insurance.
Fast forward a year and change, and everything is generally running very smoothly. Obamacare enrollment approached 12 million by the end of the 2015 regular enrollment period on Feb. 15. This is well ahead of the estimated 9.1 million enrollees that the Department of Health and Human Services believed would be signed up by the end of the year.
But just because Obamacare is succeeding now in its enrollments doesn't mean the law itself is out of the woods.
Obamacare faces a major challenge
One challenge set to shake things up in the coming weeks is a case being reviewed by the Supreme Court, King vs. Burwell. The plaintiffs in this challenge are focused on the verbiage of the law, which states that subsidies are to be paid to exchanges "established by the State."
As you probably know, not all states chose to establish their own exchanges. Some 37 states -- a figure that seemingly grows by the year -- are now a part of the federally run healthcare marketplace, Healthcare.gov. Some states found it easier to simply join Healthcare.gov from the get-go (especially those idealistically opposed to Obamacare that didn't want to accept federal funds to set up state exchanges). Meanwhile others, such as Hawaii, Oregon, and Vermont, were coerced to join Healthcare.gov after their state-run exchanges failed to either get off the ground or be profitable enough to continue running. But the one thing in common here is that for these states, the federal government is in charge of doling out subsidies on the states' behalf, rather than the states themselves handing them out. The plaintiffs are arguing against this practice and hoping to eliminate it.

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