Posted by
Defend America on Wednesday, March 24, 2010 6:06:19 PM
Via Allahpundit:
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) has a message for all the attorneys general
and Republican lawmakers who are threatening lawsuits and claiming that
an individual mandate for insurance coverage is unconstitutional: You
don't have to abide by it -- just set up your own plan.
The Oregon Democrat isn't inviting opponents to defy the
newly-enacted health care law. Instead, he's pointing out a provision
in the bill that makes moot the argument over the legality of the
individual mandate.
Speaking to the Huffington Post on Tuesday, Wyden discussed -- for
one of the first times in public -- legislative language he authored
which "allows a state to go out and do its own bill, including having
no individual mandate."
It's called the "Empowering States to be Innovative" amendment. And
it would, quite literally, give states the right to set up their own
health care system -- with or without an individual mandate or, for
that matter, with or without a public option -- provided that, as Wyden
puts it,
"they can meet the coverage requirements of the bill."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/24/wyden-health-care-lawsuit_n_511748.html
Allahpundit has more on the details:
By “comprehensive” coverage, they mean the types of benefits that the
federal law guarantees in section 1302(b). See page 103 for the full
list. Whether it’s economically feasible to even temporarily sustain a
health-care program as bloated as O-Care without a mandate is above my
pay grade — wonks are invited to sound off in the comments — but do
note that the benchmark here
isn’t universal coverage. In 10 years under O-Care,
24 million people
will still be uninsured, so a state presumably would only have to do
better than that proportionately. As for the requirement that a state
substitute would have to lower the deficit like (giggle) O-Care does,
do states also get to game the hell out of their numbers the way the
White House did to arrive at its own “deficit-reducing” CBO figures?
There’s already good reason to believe that deficits will
rise by half a trillion dollars under our new entitlement leviathan. Seems unfair to ask states to do better than that.
The goal of this provision, I assume, isn’t to encourage genuine state
innovation but simply to score a political point by making ObamaCare
seem impressive by comparison. It may well be that states can’t
sustainably achieve all of O-Care’s goals (although neither can
O-Care), but then that’s the whole debate — what should the goals of
health-care reform be as we approach an entitlements crisis? Once you
lay down statist rules, you’ve already won the game.
http://hotair.com/archives/2010/03/24/oh-by-the-way-o-care-lets-states-opt-out-of-the-individual-mandate/