Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker on Thursday, June 28, reaffirmed his refusal to implement the federal health care law despite the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling to mostly uphold it.
Advocates in the state praised the court’s decision, a business group opposed it and health care providers questioned some of its implications.
Walker said he hopes that after November, a new president and Congress will end the law, saying it “would require the majority of people in Wisconsin to pay more money for less health care.”
Walker’s health services secretary and insurance commissioner also issued statements criticizing the court ruling.
The law “is now revealed as an enormous and regressive tax on Americans. It will increase taxes especially on the poor. It will increase the cost of insurance on working middle-class families,” wrote Dennis Smith, secretary of the Wisconsin Department of Health Services.
But Ken Taylor, executive director of the Wisconsin Council on Children and Families, called the court ruling “great news for everyone in Wisconsin.”
The decision ensures that children will have access to quality, affordable health care, Taylor said in a statement.
The law has helped children with asthma, diabetes and other medical conditions by prohibiting insurance companies from denying them coverage, he said. The court’s ruling means 29,000 Wisconsin children who could have potentially lost BadgerCare coverage won’t, he said.
Wisconsin’s Community Health Centers, including Access Community Health Centers in Madison, are ready to serve more patients under the law, a group representing the centers said.
“With the funding available under the Affordable Care Act, our health centers will be able to serve more patients in underserved areas across Wisconsin and put more people to work in the process,” said Stephanie Harrison, executive director of the Wisconsin Primary Health Care Association.
But the decision will hurt small businesses and strip Wisconsin residents of their ability to make personal health care decisions, Bill Smith, state director of the National Federation of Independent Business, said in a statement.
“Small businesses here will be overwhelmed by mandates, taxes and burdens imposed on them by people whom we cannot as easily hold accountable,” Smith said.
Dr. Tim Bartholow, senior vice president of the Wisconsin Medical Society, said the law’s expansion of insurance could cause more people to get primary care, preventing some costly hospital stays.
But he said the medical society is concerned about a predicted shortage of nearly 2,200 doctors in Wisconsin by 2030, especially in primary care.
The law brings a $2.6 billion reduction in Medicare payments to Wisconsin hospitals through 2019, according to Eric Borgerding, a lobbyist with the Wisconsin Hospital Association. The money will pay for the law’s Medicaid expansion and subsidies for people to buy insurance on health care exchanges.
But Wisconsin hospitals are “well-positioned” to deal with the Medicare cuts because they are improving the quality and efficiency of care more than in other states, Borgerding said.
The court decision could boost Wisconsin’s insurance-coverage rate, already better than that of most states. The expansion might be scaled back because the court found problems with the law’s expansion of Medicaid, the state-federal health plan for the poor. But that provision affects Wisconsin less than some other states because its Medicaid program already covers more people than required.
About 526,000 state residents, or 9.4 percent of the population, were uninsured in 2010, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Only Massachusetts and Hawaii had lower rates. The national average was 16.3 percent.
About 1.2 million people in Wisconsin, or one in five residents, are on some form of Medicaid. Roughly 777,000 are on BadgerCare Plus, which mostly covers low-income families and children.
Two-thirds of Wisconsin’s uninsured residents, or about 340,000 people, would become insured by 2016 under the full federal law, according to a report last year released by Walker’s administration and commissioned by the administration of former Gov. Jim Doyle. Without the individual mandate that was upheld, that figure would have dropped to just 62,000 newly insured, the report said.
