another highest court in the land has now spoken.ç we will continue to implement this lou. and we ll work together to improve on it where we can. but what we won t do, what the country can t afford to do is refight the political battles of two years ago or go back to the way things were. joining me now for an exclusive interview, maryland congressman steny hoyer. i know you thought you had final passage of this bill two years ago, but it turned out final passage was today when the nine people across the street from you issued their report and they made the medicaid provision optional. left the rest standing. what do you make of their rewrite of the bill? well, essentially the bill is whole. we ll have to look at the medicaid provision and see what might need to be done there, but we re very, very pleased. we thought the bill was constitutional.
court has now says option is for the states not mandatory. 26 states went to the supreme court saying we don t want the medicaid provision. so a majority of the states now might not adopt the medicaid provision and the congressional budget office estimate of the 17 million who would be covered will surely now have to be revised to a lower figure. the constitutionality of the individual mandate, virtually no one has noticed how much health care coverage might have been lost today as a result of the supreme court decision. but one former democratic ç governor who understands the decision and had to administer medicaid in his state is worried tonight. i m a little nervous about the medicaid ruling. medicaid has insured more people in this bill than anything else. joining me now to analyze the
pre-existing conditions. they can no longer drop your coverage if you get sick. they can no longer jack up your premiums without reason. they are required to provide free preventive care like dhek-ups and mammograms. by this august, nearly 13 million of you will receive a rebate from yourç insurance company because it spent too much on things like administrative costs and ceo bonuses and not enough on your health care. because of the affordable health care act, young adults until they re 26 are able to stay on their parents health care plans. a provision that s already helped 6 million young americans. all of this is happening because of the affordable health care act. that was the president today offering hi simplest and clearest explanation ever of what is in the affordable care act. but the supreme court made one significant change to the affordable care act that the president did not mention. as important as the individual mandate is to the bill, the medicaid provision is is
held unconstitutional are the punitive aspect of it, the federal government withholding other money that it owes to the states on other issues if the states don t comply. megyn: this is from chief justice roberts, there was one provision of this law that required a huge medicaid expansion in all 50 states and said to the states if you don t do it, if you don t put all these poor, lower income folks on your medicaid roles you re going to lose your existing medicaid. this is what the chief justice has written. quote, nothing in our opinion precludes congress from offering funds under the healthcare act to expand the availability of healthcare and requiring that states accepting such funds comply with the conditions on their use. what congress is not free to do is to penalize the states that choose not to participate in the new program by taking away their existing medicaid funding. so they can t use that stick on the states of saying, if you don t do what we want you to do, expand these
in denying nonconsenting states all medicaid funding. it continues. these parts of the act are central to its design and operation, and all the acts and provision wos not have been even ablgted withou enacted without them. in our view it means the entire statute is inoperative. megyn: we need to figure out what is going on with this medicaid ruling. if you have people who are getting healthcare through this act from the medicaid provision, which the court has technically upheld, but seems to have given states and out clause on, saying juan williams is in my ear. if they are saying to the states, you don t really have to comply with the medicaid provisions of this healthcare act then you re talking about tens of millions of americans in states if they choose not to follow the affordable healthcare act who are no longer going to be covered.