Hear Samaritan VP talk about health care at CLA conference
By Michael Miller · Apr 01, 2014
Christian ministries have the same decisions to make under the Affordable Care Act that corporations and small businesses have to make. Do they comply with the law’s employer mandate and provide health care for each worker at the risk of losing focus on their mission? Or do they send individuals to the health care exchanges or elsewhere?
James Lansberry, executive vice president of Samaritan Ministries International, and two other public policy experts will try to answer those and other questions during a session of the 2014 Christian Leadership Alliance conference in Dallas. The conference will be held April 14-16. The panel session, “Understanding the New HealthCare Landscape,” will be at 4 p.m. April 16.
“We will be talking about the problems impacting patients and employers up until now with the ACA already and then highlight the current and future situations from a patient perspective, including delays,” James said.
James will also summarize the status of lawsuits challenging the law’s requirement that employers provide contraception coverage to employees. Josh Archambault, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Government Accountability, will speak on options for people turning to the health care exchanges. Merrill Matthews, a health policy expert at the Institute for Policy Innovation, will discuss Oklahoma’s lawsuit against the federal government that challenges tax aspects of the ACA.
A “considerable amount of Q&A” will be offered at the end, James said.
Those who attend “should go away with a pretty good understanding of what happened and what’s likely to happen in respect to the Affordable Care Act,” he said. “They should have an understanding of how that’s going to affect them personally as a citizen and as a patient and as a Christian organization if they’re a benefits coordinator or a chief financial officer coming in trying to figure out how it’s going to affect them.”