Hospital groups to SCOTUS: Withdrawing subsidies would be 'disaster' for millions

Withdrawing health insurance subsidies in states with a federally facilitated Health Insurance Marketplace “would be a disaster for millions of lower- and middle-income Americans,” the AHA, Federation of American Hospitals, Association of American Medical Colleges, and America’s Essential Hospitals told the Supreme Court in a friend-of-the-court brief filed today in King v. Burwell. “The ACA’s subsidies have made it possible for more than 9 million men, women and children to have health care coverage – some for the first time in years; some, no doubt, for the first time in their lives,” the brief notes. “That coverage allows them to go to the doctor when they are sick, and to do so without fear that the resulting bill could leave them in financial straits. If Petitioners’ interpretation is accepted, however, that salutary development will be reversed. The ranks of the uninsured will swell again, with all that portends in the way of untreated illness and overwhelming debt. That – emphatically – is not what Congress intended when it enacted a statute to create ‘near-universal coverage.’ More importantly, it is not what Congress wrote.” Trinity Health also filed a brief asking the court to follow the precedent set in Buckley v. Valeo to delay the implementation if there is an adverse decision until the end of the plan year, giving Congress an opportunity to amend the law.