Medicaid and Health Care Reform Law

Medicaid’s future tied to court decision on health-care reform, By Phil Galewitz, June 19, 2012, Washington Post: “The future of the nation’s largest health insurance program – Medicaid – hangs in the balance of the Supreme Court’s decision on the 2010 health-care reform law. The state-federal program that covers 60 million poor and disabled people would be greatly expanded under the health-care reform law, adding 17 million people starting in 2014. But if the entire law is struck down, states for the first time since 2009 would be free to tighten eligibility and make it more difficult for people to apply. The law had barred such changes. And under another scenario – if the justices declare unconstitutional just the law’s expansion of Medicaid – the entire program enacted in 1965 as part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society agenda could be threatened, health experts say…”