Wyoming businesses and individuals are trying to sort out how the Affordable Care Act it will affect them.
The ACA does not expressly address access to health care providers in rural areas, which is a big concern in Wyoming.
Another issue is that small businesses employ nearly 30-percent of Wyoming’s population. Anne Alexander is a researcher from the University of Wyoming who’s been studying the ACA. She says that healthcare exchanges could help with that. “So you have a fairly substantial piece of our population that works for small employers and then a lot of them cannot afford to provide health insurance. This exchange concept will allow those people to...many of them will be able to receive a subsidy to participate and they'll be able to participate in a market… they'll have more access to health insurance. And that's good,” says Alexander.
Alexander points out that the exchanges will have to be carefully-structured in Wyoming to work. She says state’s small population will make it harder to attract insurance companies to participate in the exchanges here.
