Supreme Court Orders the Biden Admin to Pay in Healthcare Funding Case

This latest decision comes after a long dispute between two tribes and the federal government over who is responsible for paying overhead costs in healthcare billing.

He wants to make healthcare more affordable, protect and strengthen Medicare, accelerate progress towards cancer moonshot goals, and invest in community health centers.

This is why changes need to be made to try and put this relationship back on the mend, which it will hopefully start to be after the latest Supreme Court ruling.

Since the 1800s, the federal Indian Health Service (IHS) has offered healthcare to local tribes, as was mandated under treaty responsibilities made during this time.

These hospitals and services also were regularly understaffed.

This is just one of the areas where the government is expected to pay up so that a funding gap doesn’t occur.

Whenever a tribe decides to opt into this, the IHS will give this tribe some money that it would have used to run these programs. The tribe can also get money from other programs, such as Medicare, Medicaid, and private insurers.

The IHS agreed to this proposal — and even stated that the agency would pay local tribes to run various programs and services, giving tribes the money they needed.

Local tribes began to run various aspects of healthcare services, such as emergency services. They also formed substance abuse treatment programs.

Meanwhile, the Northern Arapaho Tribe in Wyoming explained in recent court documents that the IHS spending conducted in Native American communities per person is only one-third of what the average federal spending throughout the U.S. is.

Today, a majority of federally recognized tribes now have contracts with the IHS. These contracts — in which the IHS gives tribes the healthcare funding the agency itself would’ve been spending — allow tribes to run at least part of their overall healthcare services.

These contracts didn’t include the incredibly expensive overhead costs for billing Medicare, Medicaid, and insurance companies.

The IHS didn’t include these costs in the contracts with tribes because they don’t regularly handle these costs, as other federal agencies normally foot the bill.

The San Carlos Apache Tribe revealed that they paid almost $3 million in billing costs in three years. Meanwhile, in just two years, the Northern Arapaho Tribe paid $1.5 million.

Some services they are contracted for include outpatient ambulatory medical care and primary care, nursing, mental health, radiology, physical therapy, optometry, dental care, community health services, and laboratory and pharmacy services.

However, despite providing healthcare for thousands of patients, the unit receives the lowest funding sufficiency across all of the IHS funding programs.

This is the oldest IHS facility in the nation, and one of the main issues is that other healthcare facilities throughout the US are more modern and up-to-date.

Now, the Supreme Court has also sided with the tribes — and against the federal government. This Supreme Court decision ended in a 5-4 vote, with Chief Justice John Roberts and fellow conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch siding with the Court’s three liberal justices.

It also means that healthcare services on Indian reservations will be preserved and carried out at a high standard now that the Federal Government is covering healthcare costs.

It also means that communities who have been under-served throughout the last few decades will finally have resources provided to them that they previously struggled to get.

Meanwhile, the remaining conservative justices wrote a dissent led by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who explained that “the extra federal money that the Court today green-lights does not come free.” He added, “In my view, the court should leave those difficult appropriations decisions and tradeoffs to Congress.”

This is because the purpose of this act is to give Native Americans a voice in the planning and implementation of these programs to meet the needs of their communities.

This is because they have been taking on more healthcare responsibilities but end up getting a smaller percentage of the money back from the government.

However, as Congress only appropriates $8 billion to the IHS every year, it will mean moving funding away from the poorer tribes and giving it to the richest tribes.