Delaware Dodges a Bullet, For Now

Below is our response to the Supreme Court’s King v. Burwell decision:   The recent Supreme Court ruling continues IRS subsidies for 19,128 Delawareans, the beneficiaries of the Affordable Care Act. Roughly 325 people with pre-existing conditions now have health insurance in Delaware. There are 2,502 Delaware companies now subjected to the employer mandate and fines. Since the subsidies have been upheld by the Supreme Court, 309,460 working employees in Delaware are now subject to taxes and fines, of which 32,064 are now mandated to buy insurance or pay 2% of their personal income as a penalty for not having “qualified” insurance. So nothing has changed which means that small business will continue to be disinclined to grow into this hyper regulatory environment. We have greatly expanded our Medicaid population without expanding the network to care for them, with temporary Federal subsidies. Our Delaware budget liability has precipitously risen from an historic 17%, the national average for states, to well over 20%, much of which will soon be federally unfunded. The future of Delaware Medicaid is grim.   In Delaware, Aetna and BCBS have already asked for rate increases on top of rate increases already imposed. There has been no effort to control health care costs. There are now available plans through the Delaware exchange which have no doctors, and no network. Many of the subsidized are now finding no access to healthcare because of no network. What is the point of offering these insurance services if costs are not controlled and doctors are not available?   The stock prices of health insurance industry and hospital networks are surging. Guess who really won last week? The best hope of a free market correction of a very distorted market were dashed last week by an activist court that sided with big hospital, big insurance and big government.   Chris Casscells,MD Director, Center for Healthcare Policy