Local health-care providers: Fix, not nix, Obamacare

March 29-- Mar. 29--Local health-care providers said the Affordable Care Act should be improved, not eliminated, following the Trump administration telling a federal appeals court this week to overturn the law.

The legislation, also known as Obamacare, was already threatened after a federal judge in Texas invalidated it late last year. But, goaded by President Donald Trump, the U.S. Justice Department announced on Monday that it now agrees with the judge that the whole law, not just pieces of it, should be tossed.

With the federal government no longer defending its law, more than a dozen states have intervened to defend it on appeal. The case raises the specter of an estimated 21 million people potentially losing their health insurance.

"People are going to pay one way or another" for those without coverage, said Linda Muller, president and CEO of Cornerstone Family Healthcare, a large provider for the region's most vulnerable. "We don't want to see people paying with their lives if they're denied access to care if they roll back the act."

Locally, 146,305 people receive coverage through the state health insurance marketplace created by the ACA: 90,962 in Orange County, 34,910 in Ulster County and 20,433 in Sullivan County.

Those figures include buyers of individual insurance plans, those receiving coverage through the law's expansion of Medicaid and people getting federal subsidies to offset insurance costs.

The states fighting in court to preserve Obamacare argue such individuals are most at risk of losing coverage or seeing their premiums skyrocket to unaffordable rates, if the law is overturned.

Crystal Run Healthcare said Obamacare should be fixed, not eliminated.

"The president's unrelenting attacks on the ACA are misguided and not in anyone's best interest," Crystal Run Healthcare said in a statement. "If the president is successful in undermining the ACA, thousands of Crystal Run patients could lose their health insurance coverage and be put at risk."

Scott Batulis, president and CEO of Garnet Health, owner of Orange Regional Medical Center and Catskill Regional Medical Center, agreed that the health-care system needs to be improved, "not harmed."

"Broad access to various health services, such as primary care, can ultimately keep people healthier, reduce financial strain on the acute-care hospital system, and reduce health-care costs by preventing avoidable emergency department visits and hospitalizations," Batulis said in a statement.

Kate Dabroski, spokeswoman for Montiefiore St. Luke's Cornwall hospital, said it's difficult to say how overturning Obamacare would affect providers "without knowing what the alternative would be -- meaning would there be another insurance product put in place of Obamacare, would those patients become self-pay, etc."

Speaking through a translator on Thursday, Cornerstone Family Healthcare patient Eudocia Torres Cruz, 47, of Harriman, said she can't afford the insurance offered through her employer, McDonald's.

Her husband, Tomas Pareja Lopez, 50, said he immigrated to the U.S. from Mexico in 1990, helping his wife come in 1995. She struggled to afford care until two years ago, when she purchased her Fidelis Essential Plan via New York's Obamacare exchange.

Politicians "need to consider what others make because not everyone can afford private insurance," Pareja Lopez said through a translator. "We always tell our daughters to go to school, so they can make a better life and afford (health care). If our health care went away, we may have to go back to Mexico."

daxelrod@th-record.com

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