If the new health care law wasn’t enough of a mess before last week’s Supreme Court decision, that ruling actually added another layer of cost, complexity and political contentiousness to the bill.
By striking down part of the law that required states to expand their Medicaid programs, the court tossed a very hot potato into the laps of state lawmakers everywhere.
ObamaCare required states to increase eligibility for Medicaid to 133 percent of the poverty line, or roughly $30,000 per year for a family of four. The expansion would also make childless single men (a notoriously high-cost group) eligible for Medicaid for the first time. In all, about 40 percent of all the people projected to gain coverage under ObamaCare would do so via Medicaid.
But this imposed real costs on states. For example, the Medicaid expansion would cost New Jersey taxpayers roughly $35 billion over 10 years, and New Yorkers as much as $52 billion.
Not surprisingly, many states balked — and now the high court has agreed: Congress can’t stripall Medicaid funds from states that refuse the expansion, as the ObamaCare law threatened.
So what will state legislators do now?
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