States Seek to Block Mandatory Insurance
Jefferson City, Mo. » Although President Barack Obama’s push for a health care overhaul has stalled, conservative lawmakers in more than two-thirds of the states are forging ahead with constitutional amendmentsto ban government health insurance mandates.
The proposals would assert a state-based right for people to pay medical bills from their own pocketbooks and prohibit penalties against those who refuse to carry health insurance.
In many states, the proposals began as a backlash to Democratic health care plans pending in Congress. But instead of backing away after a Massachusetts election gave Senate Republicans the filibuster power to halt the health care legislation, many state lawmakers are ramping up their efforts with new enthusiasm.
The Democrats made a huge mistake with their decision to make health insurance mandatory. It was foolhardy and was a big factor in their health care proposals being stymied from the left as well as from the right. It was unworkable. It works only through subsidies for those who can’t afford it. It changes nothing. It was really a bogus attempt to call a tax a premium because they didn’t want to raise taxes. It’s just another in a long line of games played by both sides to appear to be avoiding taxes. Instead they call them fees, or premiums.
Mandatory health insurance, after jumping through all the hoops, is single payer health care, only the public pays with premiums instead of taxes. The purpose of mandatory health insurance is to get everyone in the system so that costs can be spread out over more people. That is what the single payer system accomplishes. Single payer is the most reasonable way for government to manage the nation’s health care. The Democrats wanted to give us socialism without the stigma of the word.
Socialized health care is exactly what we need and we need to get over this aversion to the word. The capitalistic system has been strengthened immeasurably by a reasonable balance of socialism. Health care is one of those aspects of our society that does not lend itself well to free enterprise. We will eventually adopt socialized medicine like the rest of the world, but not until we overcome aversion to the word and reason overpowers rhetoric.
The moves reflect the continued political potency of the issue for conservatives, who have used it extensively for fundraising and attracting new supporters. The legal impact of any state measures may be questionable because courts generally have held that federal laws trump those in states.
Lawmakers in 35 states have filed or proposed amendments to their state constitutions or statutes rejecting health insurance mandates, according to the American Legislative Exchange Council, a nonprofit group that promotes limited government that is helping coordinate the efforts. Many of those proposals are targeted for the November ballot, assuring that health care remains a hot topic as hundreds of federal and state lawmakers face re-election.
Supporters of the state measures portray them as a way of defending individual rights and state sovereignty, asserting that the federal government has no authority to tell states and their citizens to buy health insurance.
“I think the alarm bell has been rung,” said Clint Bolick, the constitutional litigation director at the Goldwater Institute in Phoenix, which helped craft an Arizona amendment on this November’s ballot that has been used as a model in other states.
“These amendments are a way to manifest grass roots opposition” to federal health insurance mandates, Bolick said.