SCOTUS Decision and Healthcare IT

For those living in a hole that haven’t read about the SCOTUS supreme court decision that was issued today, here’s a good one paragraph summary of their decision from a post by The Atlantic:

In Plain English: The Affordable Care Act, including its individual mandate that virtually all Americans buy health insurance, is constitutional. There were not five votes to uphold it on the ground that Congress could use its power to regulate commerce between the states to require everyone to buy health insurance. However, five Justices agreed that the penalty that someone must pay if he refuses to buy insurance is a kind of tax that Congress can impose using its taxing power. That is all that matters. Because the mandate survives, the Court did not need to decide what other parts of the statute were constitutional, except for a provision that required states to comply with new eligibility requirements for Medicaid or risk losing their funding. On that question, the Court held that the provision is constitutional as long as states would only lose new funds if they didn’t comply with the new requirements, rather than all of their funding.

There have been a lot of interesting reactions to the SCOTUS decision. Many of them revolve around the politics of the decision. We’ll obviously avoid the political side of the discussion for the most part. I did find HIMSS response to the ACA Supreme Court decision quite interesting. They are mostly grateful that some of the uncertainty is gone so we can move forward in healthcare. Plus, they remind people that health IT has had bipartisan support in Washington despite Obamacare’s obviously partisan issues.

Personally, I think that this decision (regardless of which way it went) will not have a major effect on the healthcare IT and EHR world. Most of the major happenings in healthcare IT and EHR aren’t related to Obamacare. There are a few places that impact it, but most are relatively innocuous.

My biggest concern with the SCOTUS decision is how it will impact healthcare reimbursement in general. Plus, the ACA uncertainty is still there since if the Republicans take control in Washington, then you can be sure that they’re going to repeal ACA as one of the first things they do. This uncertainty could affect the health IT decision making by many institutions.

I’d be interested to hear what other impacts people think the SCOTUS ruling will have on healthcare IT. I do agree with HIMSS that I’m glad we have a decision and can at least move forward with that knowledge.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

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