Idaho Chooses Life

The debate intensifies in the Idaho Legislature over whether we should submit to President Obama and become his reluctant partner in reshaping not just health care, but America itself. Proponents of creating a state insurance exchange continue to argue that Idaho should have a seat at the table. Perhaps, they insist, we will be able to bargain for better conditions of servitude if we partner with Obama.

And certainly thousands of details regarding Obamacare remain unknown because federal bureaucrats have yet to invent them.

But one fundamental is more than clear: We will have precious little power and much responsibility under the terms of surrender.

We know this already from the way the Feds treat Idaho in operating the other great partnership, Medicaid.

Betsy Russell of the Spokesman Review reports that Idaho is already under the gun with respect to Medicaid changes demanded by Obama’s regime. These changes – separate from the “expansion” of Medicaid – will apparently result in an increase of some 70,000 on Idaho’s Medicaid rolls. This set of changes is “mandatory”, according to Health & Welfare Director Dick Armstrong.

Russell says that “Idaho could lose huge amounts of its funding for its current Medicaid program if it didn’t comply with the changed rules”.

She goes on to quote Armstrong as telling legislators, “We have to comply with the mandatory requirements ACA (ObamaCare) makes to Medicaid. The stakes are huge if we don’t”.

That is the current picture, and a flash photo of the future under ObamaCare. Our elected officials, chosen to implement policies to benefit the sovereign state of Idaho, are already being treated as rubber-stamp bureaucrats by the federal government with respect to the current Medicaid program.

The mantra, should we implement ObamaCare through a state insurance exchange, will forever be, “the consequences of non-compliance will be huge”. Just a re-run of the movie we’re already forced to watch, at great cost to taxpayers and employers.

As Chief Justice John Roberts urged in his opinion on ObamaCare, the States must take a stand.

Idaho must continue to resist the further erosion of its sovereignty by refusing to create a state insurance exchange.

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