The Huffington Post interviewed Manatt's Deborah Bachrach, a partner in the firm's Healthcare practice, and Joel Ario, a managing director with Manatt Health, for an article on the Waiver for State Provision in Section 1332 of the Affordable Care Act, also known as the 2017 State Innovation Waiver.
The Huffington Post reports that the waivers provide state leaders with the opportunity to design and implement innovative and cost-saving strategies for their public health insurance programs, as well as the incentive and means to reimagine those programs in ways that better reflect their policy goals, state demographics, budgetary constraints and political culture.
The policy implications of the 2017 State Innovation Waiver are sufficiently broad to attract interest among a diverse array of states. "That's kind of the essence of the 1332," said Ario. "It's got bipartisan roots that allow the states to experiment."
"We want people to have coverage, and we want it to be affordable, given your circumstances in a particular state . . . what's the best way to do it? If it's Georgia, it's going to look different than New York City or Oklahoma. But we have those guardrails; those core principles that I think we have some national consensus around. And now we can go to work on 50 different models to achieve those goals," said Bacharach.
Read the article here.