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FACE TIME PHOTOGRAPH BY BILL KAPINSKI / IMAGE STUDIOS, FOR INSIGHT Dan Neufelder Dan Neufelder, CEO and president of the Affinity Health System, recently took on the expanded role of senior vice president of hospital operations for Ministry Health Care and now also oversees 12 other Ministry hospitals. Neufelder has worked in health care for 33 years, first as a public accountant and consultant. He sat down with Associate Editor Nikki Kallio to talk about the U.S. Supreme Court ruling on the Affordable Care Act and how it relates to changes being made within the Affinity Health System. www.insightonbusiness .com on the Affordable Care Act ON JUNE 28 THE U.S. SUPREME Court voted to uphold the Affordable Care Act. The surprising part about it is that in the law there's a penalty if individuals choose not to buy insurance, and that penalty was considered a tax. In health care there were people that were sure it was going to be struck down, and people equally as sure that it was going to be upheld, but I don't know if anyone anticipated that it would be upheld based upon that the penalty is a tax. The second very significant thing about the Supreme Court's findings was related to the Medicaid expansion – that the federal government could not put the entire program funding at risk for an implementation of just part of it. There were two big lynchpins of health care reform. One was this individual mandate, so everyone has access to insurance regardless of pre-existing medical conditions. This is very significant – and for many people, this is a watershed event. Out of the 50 million people that currently do not have health insurance, it was estimated that over 30 million of them were expected to be able to access health care insurance through the expansion of Medicaid programs. So now that the states are not required to expand Medicaid, that August 2012 • INSIGHT | 15 [continued] » U PFR O N T