Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act tax credits for 7.5 million Americans hang in the balance while the Supreme Court deliberates over the King v. Burwell case, but cloud-based healthcare exchanges could allow states to keep healthcare coverage subsidized, according to a CIO report.
The federal HealthCare.gov site is run through Amazon Web Services. If the Supreme Court rules in favor of the plaintiff, it will become illegal to sell subsidized covered on the federal exchange. But, states would still be allowed to sell subsidized insurance on a state-run exchange.
The website was redesigned after its bumpy launch. As part of the redesign, it was set up to run on Amazon EC2 clusters as a software-as-a-service application. The SaaS application can be customized and operated by states as independent exchanges, according to the report.
States that do not currently have their own exchanges, 34 total, could launch their own independent exchanges and offer subsidized insurance, according to the report.