Tag: Obamacare

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The NCAA May Pay a Healthy Sum to Student Athletes

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By Bobby Stroup

Right now in a Los Angeles courtroom, the fate of the NCAA hangs in the balance. Perhaps as a way to preempt the outcome, on December 6, NCAA President Charlie Baker sent a letter proposing some schools should be allowed to compensate student athletes for using their name, image and likeness (NIL). President Baker is right to try and get ahead of the student-athlete compensation issue, but NIL payments are not the only issue at play. Health care will also be a critical part of future student-athlete compensation conversations.

The NCAA describes the compensation lawsuits as beginning in 2009, yet exploring this topic reveals the debate is not so novel. The NIL terminology is newer, but limiting this to an NIL problem is overly narrow. The challenge of student-athlete compensation is a broader issue that started at the founding of the organization. This issue is rooted in more than a century of health policy, and understanding that history is essential to understanding future NCAA negotiations.

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Is Mike Pence’s Medicaid Expansion a Blueprint for Donald Trump’s Health Care Reform?

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By David Orentlicher

[cross-posted at orentlicher.tumblr.com]

Donald Trump’s pledge to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act has looked much more like a plan for repeal than a plan to replace, especially in light of the kinds of reform proposals advanced by leading Republicans in Congress, including Trump’s designee for Secretary of HHS, U.S. Rep. Tom Price.

But Trump’s recent promise of “insurance for everybody,” suggests that he might actually have a serious replacement in mind. While we cannot automatically take Trump at his word, it may be the case that he is following the example of his Vice President-elect Mike Pence, who as Governor of Indiana defied Republican positioning in signing on to the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion. Read More

The Political Economy of Medicaid Expansion

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By Christopher Robertson

Many health law profs have wondered about how state officials can turn down bucketloads of federal money, without suffering the ire of their local constituents.  In states like Arizona, that frustration was spoken most vocally by the local healthcare industry and their employees, who have the most to gain from the expansion of coverage, even if the Medicaid beneficiaries are unlikely to themselves have political clout.

Well, over at the New Yorker, Sam Wang has now compiled the polling data for the gubernatorial races to ask whether “In Swing States, Is Obamacare an Asset?”  This graphic tells the whole story, focusing on states where Republican incumbents who made Medicaid-expansion decisions are now up for re-election:

Chart09-09-updated[1]

Although voters respond to a mix of positions and personalities, and these are only nine states, it is striking that the governors who declined federal money to cover their most vulnerable are also the most vulnerable at the polls.

Another Hole in the Halbig Verdict

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

Much attention has been paid recently to the contradicting decisions issued on the Halbig and King cases, which challenged the Obamacare subsidies offered to individuals purchasing insurance on federal exchanges. In a piece for Politico Magazine, Abbe R. Gluck finds a weakness in the Halbig plaintiffs’ arguments, in their own words. As Gluck writes:

What’s less known, however, is that in the 2012 constitutional case, these same challengers filed briefs describing Obamacare to the court in precisely the way they now say the statute cannot possibly be read. Namely, they assumed that the subsidies were available on the federal exchanges and went so far as to argue that the entire statute could not function as written without the subsidies. That’s a far cry from their argument now that the statute makes crystal clear that Congress intended to deny subsidies on the federal exchanges.

I am not a fan of the “gotcha” flavor that some aspects of this case have taken on, but the challengers’ 2012 statements are relevant as a legal matter because what the government has to prove to win—as a matter of black-letter law under the Chevron doctrine—is that the statute is ambiguous. (Chevron says that federal courts defer to the relevant agency’s reading of the statute when a federal statute is unclear—here, that agency is the IRS.)

The challengers have spent more than a year arguing that no reasonable reader of text could construe the statute in any way other than denying federal subsidies to insurance purchasers on exchanges operated by the federal government. But what about their statements from 2012—statements then echoed by Justices Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas and Alito in their joint dissent to the Supreme Court’s ruling in the constituitional challenge, NFIB v. Sebelius?

You can read more, including the relevant passages from the NFIB v. Sebelius briefs, here.