So as to avoid looking like gremlins who could give a crap whether or not you had health care, Republicans long ago settled on the Federalist argument against the PPACA: the federal government has no business regulating individual insurance markets. It's not that Republicans don't want health care reform—they totes do!—it should just be left up to the states. Mitt Romney has been the primary ambassador for this point of view, as Obamacare, which Romney says he would repeal all over its face, was partially modeled off Romney's Massachusetts plan. The only way to wiggle out of that is the state's rights argument, which goes like this:
What's good for one state may not suit another and that states should have the freedom to choose what works best for them rather than have to conform to a federal one-size-fits-all plan.
Seems reasonable. So then, if another state should decide to implement Obamacare Romneycare, that's their prerogative, right? They're just doing what "works best for them," right?
| Related: Rick Scott Will Implement Obamacare Over His Medicare-Defrauding Dead Body |
Enter everybody's new favoirte conservative bilious colander, the Daily Caller, with the headline: "Watch out: Democrats are trying to implement Obamacare at the state level." Joanne Butler, a senior economics fellow at the Caesar Rodney Institute of Delaware, a "non-partisan free market think tank" that seems to be mainly a vehicle climate-warming skepticism, penneth the following:
If your state government is controlled by the Democratic Party, brace yourself. It’s clear Democrats have decided that if Obamacare doesn’t survive a federal court test, they'll battle it out state by state...While certain blue-state governors work at burnishing their health care credentials, they're also increasing taxes and decreasing individual liberties. Of course, in Washington's vaunted Democratic circles, individual liberties are just pesky gnats to be swatted.
(By the by, what are those taxes and individual liberties, exactly? Butler—"of course!"—doesn't say, though if she wanted an example of the failure of individually-mandated health care, couldn't she have looked to Massachusetts? If she didn't find it there, what would that have told her? If Romney's plan was a success, then we could apply to other states; if it was a failure, he should have answered for it. Neither does Butler's anti-Obamacare argument any good, so she ignores the existence of the program entirely, though it's the only actual example of what she's prophesying.)
There's plenty to love in Butler's post, including that Delaware is health-care is the Vietnam in the conservatives' Obamacare domino theory (if we don't stop it in Delaware, it'll spread to Laos!), and that Democratic governors only want to pass health care reform to get a profile in Vanity Fair. Guh?
But the true value of the article is the extent to which it blatantly reveals that conservatives' problem with Obamacare has nothing to do with states' rights. Butler is concerned that Democrats will be "battling it out state by state," as if that were part of some underhanded conspiracy and not the exact definition of the state-enacted reform process conservatives are proposing as an alternative to Obamacare. If a state were to enact a program modeled off Obama's ACA or Romney's state-level mandated insurance program—despite the existence of such a program created by their current presidential nominee—conservatives like Butler would be just as up in arms as they are now about Obamacare. States' rights is clearly not the issue.
And given that the individual mandate was a 20 year old idea taken from the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, which apparently had no problem with the taxes it would increase and the liberties it would decrease until Obama took it up, conservatives' problem doesn't even seem to be Obamacare. Their problem is, and always has been, Obama. If the ACA is overturned, and the health-care fight is taken to the state level, that will only become more and more obvious.
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