President Obama’s reelection, along with the Supreme Court’s ruling last June on his signature health-care reform, may seem to have guaranteed that the Affordable Care Act (ACA) will remain the law of the land. But that could turn out to be the easy part of Obamacare. Implementing the ACA’s main provisions by January 1, 2014 — the date on which the law is to take full effect — presents a more grueling and protracted set of tests.
The next round of health-care-policy battles will play out not just before Congress but also in state capitals and health-care markets across the country. You could think of these fights as being like a martial-arts battle, in which various “pressure points” are attacked to produce significant pain, serious injury, or even temporary immobilization, not to mention an aversion to future fighting. Let’s take a closer look at the more painful pressure points in the ACA.
Advertisement 1) Health exchanges. Nearly two-thirds of states still are not fully on board with running their own exchanges to offer the federally subsidized coverage dictated by the ACA. As many as 23 states would rather leave the daunting implementation process entirely in the hands of federal officials. Another ten may enlist as junior apprentices in largely federal-run “partnership” exchanges. But the White House desperately needs state governments to provide infrastructure and local-market experience as well as to take more of the political blame for the implementation fiascos ahead. Many states complain that the rules for exchanges are unclear, costly to administer, coercive, or all of the above. The federal government is supposed to set up exchanges in states that fail to do so, but, later next month, a federal district court in Oklahoma will begin to rule on arguments that directly challenge the authority of the federal government to distribute tax credits in federally run exchanges, which does not appear to be provided for in the text of the ACA.2) Medicaid expansion. By one count earlier this month in The New England Journal of Medicine, 17 states have not yet agreed to expand their Medicaid coverage up to the ACA-designated 138 percent of the federal poverty level, A somewhat smaller number of states are officially opposed to the Medicaid expansion, and well under half of all states support it. The Supreme Court ruled that the Medicaid expansion must be optional, not a mandate enforced with penalties to states’ existing Medicaid programs. Many governors and state legislators doubt that the law’s initially generous federal funding will be sustainable within a largely unreformed, but expanded, entitlement program that already is straining their budgets. Existing Medicaid programs already fail to attract enough physicians because of their below-cost reimbursement policies.
3) Individual-mandate enforcement. The mandate that, beginning next year, requires almost everyone to purchase coverage meeting federal standards remains highly unpopular. Moreover, the tax penalties to enforce it are quite small compared with the premium costs of the required coverage. Many young and healthy individuals will therefore have a strong incentive to remain uninsured. Various exemptions (including those for the relative “unaffordability” of the premiums relative to one’s household income) will limit further the possibility of requiring coverage.
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