Our meeting on July 20, 2012 featured a discussion of the recent Supreme Court ruling upholding most of the Affordable Care Act, presenting interesting implementation and political issues that will play out for months and years, especially at the state level. We held the meeting in Nelson Mullins’ picturesque conference room overlooking the U.S. Capitol.
The Supreme Court discussion was led by Rebekah Plowman, a partner in Nelson Mullins’ Atlanta office who focuses on fraud and abuse counseling and litigation, and who also wrote an amicus brief in the Supreme Court case arguing on behalf of the North Carolina and Minnesota legislatures that the ACA’s conditioning of federal funds on participation in the Medicaid expansion constituted coercion and was thus unconstitutional under the Spending Clause. Although they lost on that issue before the 11th Circuit, the Supreme Court ruled in their favor.
Also leading the discussion was long-time Washington insider Joseph Antos. Joe is the Wilson H. Taylor Scholar in Health Care and Retirement Policy at the American Enterprise Institute. He also is a Commissioner of the Maryland Health Services Cost Review Commission, and an Adjunct Professor at the School of Public Health of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Prior to joining AEI, he was Assistant Director for Health and Human Resources at the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), and he held senior positions in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the Office of Management and Budget, and the President’s Council of Economic Advisers.
As a second and complimentary topic, we were fortunate to have as a speaker Vish Sankaran, a special advisor to the CMS Administrator, who presented his program on re-organizing the manner in which CMS collects, stores, analyzes and shares data—a program he refers to as his Knowledge Discovery Infrastructure.
Click here to read Mr. Antos' presentation
Click here to read Ms. Plowman's presentation