Michael Leavitt envisions a post-King negotiation to amend the ACA

If the Supreme Court upholds the plaintiffs in King v. Burwell and thus cripples the ACA exchanges in three quarters of the states, what then? Neither side is talking about how they might compromise to avoid de-insuring 7 million Americans and crippling the insurance market. But Michael Leavitt -- former HHS Secretary under George W. Bush, former 3-term governor of Utah, current CEO of an eponymous healthcare consultancy -- goes there, in an interview with me, now up on healthinsurance.org. Here's the core of what he envisions:

[A] possibility would be to take the current subsidy structure, but allow people who qualify for a subsidy to get it not just in a state exchange but in a private exchange that may be authorized by the state. Multiple private exchanges might begin to pop up. You’d end up with  a competitive marketplace with many more exchanges and lots more innovation.

I hope you'll read the whole thing.  And then, perhaps, a prior interview I conducted with Leavitt last June about the scope for state innovation in healthcare that the ACA does provide. And while you're at it, a  January 2014 Leavitt interview with Julie Appleby of KHN in which he expressed considerable empathy for the HHS officials trying to get the ACA implemented.

P.S. My own take on conservative demands for less regulation and more "innovation" in health insurance, probably inspired in part by this interview (though more immediately by Ross Douthat's column on conservative policy proposals), is in the prior post.