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In all likelihood, the US Supreme Court will rule next week on one of the biggest political issues of the year -- President Obama's health care overhaul. To understand a little bit more about what the law entails and what is at stake for Connecticut, WNPR's Jeff Cohen sat down with Victoria Veltri -- the state's healthcare advocate.
Should the law survive next week, there will eventually be something called an exchange. If you don't have health insurance, that's where you'll be able to go to choose one of several new insurance plans. Those plans will have to cover certain things, called essential health benefits. And to help you pay for the insurance, you may even get money from the government.
Some states don't much like the law and aren't building their own exchanges. But Connecticut is, and one of the first major tasks people here are facing is this: defining those essential health benefits.
"The Affordable Care Act says to all of the states, 'Look, we want you to have an exchange, and when you have an exchange, we want you to have health plans that offer at least these essential benefits...Things like colonoscopy coverage. Diabetes management treatment. Physicals..."
That's Victoria Veltri. She's the state's healthcare advocate and, let's be clear, she really likes the Affordable Care Act. And she says that while the state is still in the process of defining these essential health benefits, it seems that the new plans up for debate won't likely leave anything major out. That, for Veltri, is good news.
But once they decide which benefits are covered, there are other questions: What does "covered" mean? How many visits will a physical therapy patient get? And how much will those visits cost?
"The flip side of it is we want people to be able to enroll in these plans. We want them to be affordable. So we have to figure out a way -- if you're going to offer all of these benefits, how do we make the plans affordable?"
But affordable is relative. If the state's uninsured are poor, the plans will either have to be really inexpensive or heavily subsidized. If they're not so poor, affordable might mean something totally different.
So, yeah, people like Veltri -- they have their work cut out for them. And I don't even have time to talk about what happens should the Supreme Court throw the whole law out.
For WNPR, I'm Jeff Cohen.
