August 6, 2012

When the Supreme Court upheld the Affordable Care Act, they also ruled that states cannot be forced to expand Medicaid. There have been estimates that over half of the total number of people who would gain health insurance under health care reform would gain it through the expansion of Medicaid. The Kaiser Family Fund has a new report on Medicaid expansion, including a state by state breakdown of how many people would benefit, what it would cost and who would end up paying. See http://www.kff.org/healthreform/8076.cfm for the full report, the summary or press information on the study.

While there will be a good deal of talk about health care reform in the fall elections, the law should be here to stay. Because the law requires individual states to implement the law, the debate will now focus on the Virginia General Assembly. The Virginia General Assembly is the legislature for Virginia. It will have to decide to move forward with health care reform as well as how to move forward. Our first effort is to convince the members of the General Assembly to move forward on health care reform. You can help by SENDING A SHORT EMAIL TO YOUR STATE LEGISLATORS. Go to http://legis.virginia.gov/ and click on who’s my legislator. You will quickly get to a page where you can email your state senator and state representative. Just send a quick note telling them you support Virginia moving forward on health care reform. The General Assembly won’t meet to decide whether and what to do until early next year.

A Small Business Majority study found that the cost of no health care reform on small business would be huge. The study, available at http://www.smallbusinessmajority.org/small-business-research/economic-research.php found that no health care reform would cost 178,000 jobs in small businesses nationwide. The study also found that small businesses would spend $2.4 trillion on health care in the next ten years if there is no change in the system.

Among the reports issued by the Virginia Health Reform Initiative (the governor appointed task force studying health care reform in Virginia) was a study on the potential size of the exchange in Virginia. The report found that there would be at least 60,000 small businesses with 120,000 covered employees in the small business exchange. The full report, along with other VHRI reports + information, can be found at:

http://www.hhr.virginia.gov/Initiatives/HealthReform/MeetingResources/MtgRes.cfm