What a debacle is our non beloved Obamacare, what an awful mess. Now, we find that the law does not provide for premium subsidies if the states do not set up insurance exchanges. From a Wall Street Journal column by Jonathan H. Adler and Michael F. Cannon:
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act offers “premium assistance”—tax credits and subsidies—to households purchasing coverage through new health-insurance exchanges. This assistance was designed to hide a portion of the law’s cost to individuals by reducing the premium hikes that individuals will face after ObamaCare goes into effect in 2014. (If consumers face the law’s full cost, support for repeal will grow.) The law encourages states to create health-insurance exchanges, but it permits Washington to create them if states decline. So far, only 17 states have passed legislation to create an exchange.
This is where the glitch comes in: ObamaCare authorizes premium assistance in state-run exchanges (Section 1311) but not federal ones (Section 1321). In other words, states that refuse to create an exchange can block much of ObamaCare’s spending and practically force Congress to reopen the law for revisions.
This is what happens when politicians try to recreate an entire sector of the economy in one gulp, employing politically corrupt methods, and against the will of the people.
Non cooperating states have been given a huge hammer with which to kill this mess even if it passes constitutional muster. Just don’t create exchanges. But beyond this immediate issue, “We have a problem, Houston:” More than half the country is resisting this law as overbroad, too controlling, dishonestly promoted, and economically obtuse. That isn’t going to change, regardless of what the Supremes do with the individual mandate.
It isn’t healthy politically for the country to keep fighting about it, and the country just isn’t going to assume a supine posture in the face of it. The solution is for us to revise the law in a way that can unify rather than divide us, you know, the kind of approach our thoroughly divisive president falsely promised to govern upon?
Here’s why that won’t happen except via the political force of electing a unified anti Obamacare government: Arrogance of the Administration and its supporters in the current Congress. Ego. Hubris. Destructive equality-of-outcome ideology. Desire to control. Statist tendencies.
Hard letter to follow.
