Gov. Steve Beshear, who led Kentucky’s pioneering efforts to enable people without health insurance to shop for coverage through marketplaces called “exchanges,” praised yesterday’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling in favor of the exchanges, a central component of the Affordable Care Act.
In a statement from his office, he said the ruling “reaffirms that, from the very start, we did the right thing for the more than 500,000 Kentuckians who have qualified for health care coverage through kynect since Jan. 1, 2014.”
“Making health care coverage accessible and affordable to all citizens is the cornerstone of the Affordable Care Act,” Beshear said. “To conclude that the law’s intent was only to offer subsidies to those who purchased health care coverage through their state’s health benefit exchange when many states declined to establish one would have penalized the very individuals the law was designed to help. I am pleased that the U.S. Supreme Court wisely ruled in favor of those 6.4 million people in the nation who could have lost their access to affordable health insurance.”
The ruling in King v. Burwell resolves the issue of whether Americans who purchased their insurance through the federal insurance exchange are eligible for tax subsidies that help them afford insurance premium costs, according to the Foundation for a Healthy Kentucky. While this case was not a direct threat to Kentuckians because of the state-developed exchange Kynect, it could have impacted low-income families in states that opted not to create their own state-level insurance exchange.