New Front: Senators introduce bill for states to ‘opt-out’ of Obamacare
The next shoe drops on ObamaCare. Yesterday twenty-six states won a decisive legal victory with U.S. District Judge Roger Vinson’s rejection of the constitutionality of ObamaCare. Today two leading U.S. senators introduced legislation to allow each state to “opt-out” of ObamaCare’s major provisions.
In a press conference, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) and John Barrasso (R-Wyoming) introduced S.244 (The State Health Care Choice Act) that would eliminate the individual and employer mandates of the unpopular health care law. It also would end the forced expansion of state Medicaid programs.
“Yesterday, Judge Vinson ruled that the Obama health care bill was unconstitutional,” said Barasso. “This is the second dagger into the heart of ObamaCare.”
“We’re opening up a third front in the challenges against Obama health care,” said Graham. If the bill passed, “it would be easier for me to imagine more than half the states opting out of Obamacare. The bill would fall.”
On first impression, this strikes me as a tremendously bad idea.
Perhaps it’s because I’m in California, and I’m used to elected officials making unwise, insensitive decisions, but any state-by-state solution flies in the face of something fundamental: there should be no opt-in, opt-out, opt-up, opt-down, or opt-sideways. This should be like “two senators want states to decide whether to force citizens into church on Sunday morning” — unthinkable.
It sounds good on the surface, but there would have to be some way to insure that the people in the States that opted out didn’t have to subsidize the folks in the States that don’t. Don’t count on that.
But if you did manage to pull that off the Progressives would start screaming. One of the main impediments in the past to their social engineering schemes is that many of the people who were getting shafted by them voted with their feet. Student busing, for example, resulted in massive “white flight” from the large urban areas. The guinea pigs could escape. That is what they fear.
If States are allowed to opt out of Obamacare they will become magnets for the people and businesses who have the most to lose from the consequences of Obamacare, and they know it.