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What health reform means for the people of Illinois

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Thursday, March 29, 2012

In Short: SCOTUS and the ACA

For three days this week, the Supreme Court of the United States heard oral arguments on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The case against the ACA is broken up into four main arguments, primarily on the constitutionality of the Individual Mandate and Medicaid Expansion. The historic health law case has made a splash across Capitol Hill and beyond; and the responses range from adversarial to insightful to amusing and back:

The New York Times profiles Jonathan Gruber, the M.I.T. professor responsible for the academic research and number-crunching behind the ACA’s individual mandate.

CommonHealth’s Carey Goldberg talks with Kevin Outterson, director of Boston University’s Health Law Program and a frequent contributor to the Incidental Economist, on the court hearing, and then turns the conversation into a humorous animated video.

AHIP compiled various independent studies on the negative impact of severing the Individual Mandate from the ACA in this infographic.

For those who want to go straight to the source, download the audio recordings and transcripts of the oral arguments from March 26th, March 27th and March 28th.

The Supreme Court will announce its decision by the end of June, at which point, the bill will be handed back to Congress. Will this Congress, notoriously unable to come to agreement across party lines, be up to the challenge? The Hill Health Watch reports.

No matter what happens, Illinois Health still Matters; the State will be transitioning Medicaid into managed care, providers will be challenged to develop new payment models, and we still need to innovate to effectively serve vulnerable populations in tough fiscal times.

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