CRMC Official Applauds Healthcare Subsidy Ruling

An official with the Cheyenne Regional Medical Center Institute of Population Health says the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling upholding healthcare subsidies under the federal Affordable Care Act is good news for healthcare in Wyoming.

Tracy Brosius says the most obvious impact of the ruling is that the roughly 21,000 Wyoming residents who used the subsidy to purchase insurance through the health insurance exchange in the second year of the program will be able to afford health insurance.

She calls that "very good news for our consumers".

She says it's also good news for Wyoming hospitals because people with the subsidies will have insurance to cover their healthcare costs.

She says another benefit to to the state in general is that people will have money for preventative healthcare. She says preventive care helps keep costs down because it's generally less expensive to prevent a health problem than it is to deal with it after it becomes a life-threatening condition.

And finally Brosius says the ruling was especially good news for small hospitals in Wyoming, because she says the level of uncompensated  care costs faced by such hospitals prior to the implementation of the subsidies was "unsustainable" over the long term.

The high court upheld the subsidies under the ACA on June 25th by a vote of 6-3.