Over the past year, 34 states have decided against implementing some, or any, parts of Obamacare’s health insurance exchanges—and with good reason. As Cato Institute Health Policy Director Michael Cannon argues in his recent paper “50 Vetoes: How States Can Stop the Obama Health Care Law,” states have the power to block many of Obamacare’s most troublesome provisions and consequences simply by refusing to participate in the implementation process. Cannon’s paper provides an array of reasons why state legislators should resist the law. Here are six:
1. Neither the exchanges nor the Medicaid expansion are mandatory. Obamacare’s authors gave states the option of setting up exchanges. But they did not—and could not—make it mandatory, because the Supreme Court has has ruled that the Constitution does not allow the federal government to “commandeer” states into such actions.
2. The “deadlines” for choosing to implement the exchanges aren’t real deadlines at all—so states can always create exchanges later if they choose to do so. States were originally told they had to submit their exchange proposals by November 2012. That supposed deadline was eventually pushed back to December and, earlier this year, the bureaucrat who runs the agency in charge of certifying the state exchanges, Gary Cohen, admitted “there is no deadline.” States could get approval whenever they were ready. Indeed, one of the law’s architects and key backers, MIT health economist Jonathan Gruber, recently told officials in Florida that there was no reason to proceed with exchange creation in 2014.
Read More at reason.com . By Peter Suderman.
Photo Credit: Fresh Conservative (Creative Commons)
From: http://www.westernjournalism.com/6-reasons-why-states-should-continue-to-oppose-obamacare/
