“It is a huge victory,” said Wendy Lazarus, co-president of The Children’s Partnership, a national children’s health advocacy group based in Santa Monica. “It’s a victory to be able to say the law applies and we’re doing the right thing,” she said. “We need to celebrate that and shout it from the rooftops.”
Lazarus said leaders in Congress, in anticipation of a Supreme Court ruling against subsidies, were discussing eliminating the individual mandate and other basic elements of the ACA, and that could’ve had a disastrous effect on California’s reform effort.
“The ripple effect, the disruption caused, that would have almost surely reached California,” Lazarus said. “That could’ve toppled the progress we’re making in California.”
She said premiums here could have been affected by higher costs in other states, due to a lack of federal subsidies, and because so many insurers in California are national companies, those costs likely would’ve resulted in higher premiums here.
