Morning Plum: A Court decision gutting ACA could be a lot worse than you think

[mahatmakanejeeves]

The quoted material comes from two sources. Each source has three quoted paragraphs. Thus, the four-paragraph limit has not been exceeded.

Morning Plum: A Court decision gutting ACA could be a lot worse than you think

Morning Plum
By Greg Sargent February 26 at 9:16 AM
@theplumlinegs

The potential impact of a Supreme Court decision gutting Obamacare subsidies in three dozen states is often discussed in terms of the millions who could lose health coverage, potentially destabilizing insurance markets across the country. But it turns out that the impact could be considerably more dramatic than that, radiating out to produce untold economic damage, too.

That’s the conclusion of a must-read from Joshua Green of Bloomberg Businessweek. Green talks to health care policy and industry experts and concludes a ruling against the law could “hurl the political system, and no small part of the economy, into chaos.” Of particular interest is the view offered by Stuart Butler, a longtime fixture in conservative health care wonk circles:

The result would not just leave millions uncovered but also risk destroying the individual health-care markets in states that don’t act….On the business front, the effects would be no less significant.

“If the U.S. health-care system were its own economy,” says Butler, “it would be the sixth-largest in the world — larger than Britain’s.” Entire segments of the health system redesigned their business models to take advantage of the ACA’s incentives. Hospitals, for instance, were given a trade-off: They stopped receiving government payments to offset the cost of treating the uninsured, cuts that amount to $269 billion over a decade. In return, they were promised millions of new patients insured through federal subsidies.

“All the major hospital systems and big insurers like Kaiser and Geisinger spent a ton of money adapting to the ACA,” says Butler. If subsidies vanish, “suddenly the market is misaligned. If you’ve hired all these new doctors and health-care workers to cover all these new people walking in the door, and they don’t come, what do you do? You lay them off.”

Meanwhile, a Republican Senator, Ben Sasse of Nebraska, is sounding similar warnings in the Wall Street Journal. Sasse tells fellow Republicans they’d better have an alternative to deal with those who might lose insurance, to avert a political nightmare for Republicans: “Chemotherapy turned off for perhaps 12,000 people, dialysis going dark for 10,000. The horror stories will be real.”

[appalachiablue]

1. Good post. The NE Senator makes much sense Re serious medical cut offs & pol damage.

[area51]

2. Odd statement.

"If you’ve hired all these new doctors and health-care workers ...You lay them off."

Why would anyone do that? For many years we've had a doctor shortage in this country.