Those in the health insurance industry were glad about one thing today: A decision has finally been made about the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.
But the good news for them stopped there.
“While it may on the surface appear courageous to uphold the most unpopular provision of the unpopular law—the individual mandate—the Court did so by citing Congress’s taxing power, and not by expanding an already overreaching Commerce Clause power,” says Tom Blomberg, a former lawyer and regional vice president at The IHC Group.
“Conversely, or at least apparently conversely, the Court did show some states rights backbone and ruled that the Medicaid expansion could not be forced upon the states via the threat of withholding the states’ entire Medicaid allotment from the federal government,” he says. ”How states will interpret that, how the federal and state governments will fund any of this, or how this truly impacts health care costs, remains to be seen.
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