Utah Opt-Out

KSL TV in Salt Lake City reports that Republican Utah lawmaker Carl Wimmer wants Utahns to have the option of opting out of any national healthcare program that might be imposed on the country from Washington, DC.  Wimmer is drafting an opt-out amendment to Utah's Constitution, which he believes will receive overwhelming support from citizens of the Beehive State. 

While a constitutional amendment is a sound and desirable backup measure, and a powerful prophylactic against future over reach by Washington, Wimmer and his compatriots are strategically positioned to drastically reduce the chances of nationalized healthcare ever occurring in the first place.  To do so, they need to prevail upon Republican U.S. Senator Bob Bennett to stop trying to negotiate a version of ObamaCare Lite with the White House and his Democratic Senate Colleagues.

Senator Bennett’s version of ObamaCare, which he has introduced with Oregon Democratic Senator Ron Wyden as The Healthy Americans Act (S. 391), is really nothing more than ObamaCare in drag—a Trojan RHINO with ObamaCare hiding inside ready to be smuggled into the country disguised as a “bipartisan compromise.”  Bennett’s “solution” to the problems afflicting the healthcare system is not a conservative, market-based solution that one would expect a conservative Republican Senator to promote; it is not a plan that encourages and promotes individual self-reliance; it is RHINOCare (Republican Healthcare In Name Only) that simply wraps ObamaCare in a Republican skin and does not reflect conservative principles and values.

The bill would end the employer tax exclusion for employer-based health-insurance benefits and replace it with a combination of direct federal subsidies and individual tax deductions.  In other words, it would increase people’s dependency on Washington dramatically.  Mandatory insurance premiums would be collected through automatic payroll deductions from workers’ paychecks, which would be enforced by the IRS.  Employers also would be required to pay into the nationalized healthcare system on a payment schedule based on number of employees, employer revenue and an average-plan premium—clearly a tax on employers to fund universal heath coverage run by the federal government.

Senator Bennett’s bill would replace the employer as the tax wedge in the health-insurance market with a direct government tax-and-subsidy wedge designed to drive the after-tax price of healthcare below market-clearing levels—it’s called price controls and it will lead inevitably to healthcare rationing.  Hence, the bill would replace one poison with another:  Rather than having the employer make critical decisions about what kind of healthcare is available to workers, as the current system does, government would assume a much more direct and active role in making these determinations.  For example, the Wyden-Bennett plan would replace the current health system with one that is heavily regulated by the federal government.  Individuals would have access only to plans permitted by the government, and they would be required by federal law to purchase such a plan. 

The federal government would standardize the entire insurance market through direct mandates and regulations.  The federal government would determine which health plans people could buy.  The bill would establish a standard benefits package.

The bill requires all individuals to purchase government-defined health coverage without any real choice for individuals to pick a plan that best suits their needs.  Senator Bennett even requires that all health insurance policies pay for abortions.

The plan would use direct government regulation to “squeeze out inefficiencies” in the system.  In other words, the system would rely upon a new federal bureaucracy to implement “cost-control” measures that would ration and delay care to reduce overall healthcare spending. 

Let’s call a spade a spade:  Wyden-Bennett represents a form of healthcare fascism in which government and private insurance companies work hand-in-glove (an insidious “public-private partnership”) to control who spends how much, on what medical goods and services, for whom, under what circumstances and on what schedule.  While the bill would leave a private-insurance façade on the system, Senator Bennett is actually proposing to turn healthcare over to the government to run, making private insurance companies and healthcare providers essentially agents of the federal government. 

Beyond the fatally flawed nature of Senator Bennett’s bill, there is an important political reason for him to stop negotiating with the White House on healthcare. A united Republican front is required in the Senate to stop the Democrats from ramming ObamaCare through the Congress by a razor thin majority. True, a united Republican front in the U.S. Senate may not be sufficient to head nationalized healthcare off at the pass.  Senate Democrats could ram it down the nation’s throat through a special provision called Reconciliation, which short circuits the Senate’s super-majority rules that ordinarily protect an intense minority from being run rough shod over by a bare majority.  Under Reconciliation, which drastically limits debate and amendment opportunities, a mere 51 votes is all that is required to pass legislation. Ordinarily, 60 votes are required to cut off debate before bringing a measure to a vote. 

However, with a united Republican front in the Senate, Democrats would be hard pressed to jam a bill as comprehensive and detested as ObamaCare down Americans’ throats.  Current polls indicate that more people oppose ObamaCare than support it.  Moreover, Senate Republicans stand on very strong procedural grounds for resisting a bum’s rush on government-run healthcare through the Reconciliation process.  It would take an act of extraordinary arrogance and recklessness for the Democratic Leadership to use Reconciliation this way.

During deliberations on the Senate Budget Resolution earlier this year, Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC) introduced a point-of-order amendment that would require a 60-vote majority to pass “any bill, joint resolution, amendment, motion, or conference report that eliminates the ability of Americans to keep their health plan or their choice of doctor (as determined by the Congressional Budget Office).”  The Senate approved the DeMint Amendment unanimously. 

Subsequently, before the Senate Budget Resolution went to a Conference Committee where differences with the House Budget Resolution were to be worked out, DeMint offered a motion to instruct the Conferees not only to insist on retaining the 60-vote provision in the final Conference Report but also to widen the scope of the provision to cover any provision and so forth that decreases the number of Americans enrolled in private health insurance while increasing the number enrolled in government-managed, rationed health care.  The DeMint motion to instruct passed the Senate by an overwhelming vote of 79 to 14. 

As a matter of congressional comity, the House ordinarily would have been expected to accede to the Senate provision since it affected Senate rules that applied only to the Senate.  Remarkably, Senate Budget Committee Chairman, Kent Conrad, allowed the DeMint 60-vote requirement to be removed from the Budget Resolution in Conference. 

It is time to bring some sanity to the healthcare debate.  Let’s hit the reset button.  There is no emergency and no necessity to pass health legislation this year.  Senate Republicans must form a united front to insist that the Senate abide by the 60-vote rule it passed twice in recent months requiring that it not pass major health reform under Reconciliation.  They owe it to the Senate in which they serve; they owe it to the American people whom they represent.