November 13, 2013
The AHA today filed a friend-of-the-court brief in support of the Department of Health and Human Services in a federal lawsuit (Halbig et al. v. Sebelius) seeking to prevent participants in federally-facilitated exchanges from receiving premium subsidies under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. “AHA writes to offer guidance, from hospitals’ perspective, on the disastrous impact plaintiffs’ position will have on American health care if they prevail,” the brief states. “…In short, the ACA will not work without subsidies, and Congress knew it. Yet plaintiffs insist that Congress designed the ACA so that tens of millions of Americans, in more than half the states, would be walled off from subsidies altogether. That interpretation should be rejected for many reasons: It would be devastating to the ACA and to that statute’s key goals. It would be equally devastating to America’s hospitals – especially to ‘safety-net’ hospitals, which care for large numbers of the poorest among us. And, critically, it bears no resemblance to what Congress intended.”
Source: AHA Newshttp://www.ahanews.com/ahanews/jsp/display.jsp?dcrpath=AHANEWS/AHANewsNowArticle/data/ann_111313_subsidies&domain=AHANEWS