By Douglas Holtz-Eakin
The Supreme Court has upheld the Affordable Care Act (ACA), a frustrating situation in which conservatives won the policy battle, but lost the war over the Act. In particular, the Court held that Congress cannot use the Commerce clause to compel commerce. The individual mandate qua mandate is unconstitutional. However, the Congress has the right to impose taxes (if not punitive and excessive), which permits the Obama administration to add a tax on millions of uninsured Americans in addition to the ACA’s already-massive tax burden on the middle class.
The Court ruled that a Medicaid expansion could be an unconstitutional federal coercion of the states, but this expansion does not have a penalty large enough to pass that threshold. Interestingly, the Court opened up the possibility that governors could refuse the Medicaid expansion. Those same individuals would then be eligible for subsidies in the exchanges. If all the governors refused the expansion, and if individuals take up subsidized insurance the federal cost heads even farther north.
In a bit of a pyrrhic victory, the Forum’s amicus briefs, signed by over 200 economists, were cited twice in the Court’s dissenting opinion. (See my amicus brief.)
The field of play now shifts from a legal battle to a policy debate. In addition to the Court’s endorsement of the policy foundations of the challenge to the ACA, the fundamental policy flaws remain.
The ACA remains a damaging, anti-growth vehicle for taxation. The so-called Medicare surtax increases marginal tax rates on the return to saving, investment, and innovation. The medical device tax will hurt innovation and cost jobs. A bill to repeal it is gathering dust in the Senate. Also, the insurers fee – the “premium tax” – will roil insurance markets, disrupt patient-provider relationships, and the vast majority of the burden will fall on the middle class.
The Supreme Court’s decision upholding the ACA is deliciously ironic. The “individual mandate”–an idea promoted for everyone in the 90s and for Massachusettians (?) in the 2000s by the arm of the Republican party known as the Heritage Foundation–was found to be legal. But not as a mandate, instead as a tax.
Patient-centered care and patient engagement have become central to the vision of a high value health delivery system. The delivery system is evolving from a fee-for-service transactional payment model to a value-based purchasing model using outcome data and quality improvement and attainment. The Centers of Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and private payers have spurred delivery redesign of networks that focuses on a set of clinical quality measures and patient care experiences along with efficiency measures.
