Nearly one hundred and eleven thousand Mississippians receive insurance benefits through the federal program. Many conservative officials in Mississippi, including Governor Tate Reeves, have been vocal about their opposition to the Affordable Care Act and efforts to expand Medicaid through the 2010 law. Richard Roberson with the Mississippi Hospital Association says the court's ruling protects thousands of participants in the state from losing health coverage.
“The immediate thing is we’re not going to have to worry about loss of coverage or loss of access to healthcare coverage that’s been made available through the Affordable Care Act,” says Roberson. “And the option for Medicaid expansion is still available for the state to take advantage of.”
The Supreme Court ruled that this challenge did not meet the procedural threshold to overturn the Affordable Care Act. This was the third attempt to overturn the act before the court. Jameson Taylor is Senior Vice President of Policy at the Mississippi Center for Public Policy. He says this attempt shows the court is unwilling to overturn the law in its entirety.
Taylor says “I believe you’re still going to see legal challenges related to the implementation of Obamacare because it opens the door to just so many ways of regulating healthcare activities, that it’s going to infringe upon people’s rights and there’s going to continue to be court cases.”
Mississippi has one of the highest rates of uninsured residents in the nation and is one of 12 states that have not expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act.
