Posted on 08/01/2010 10:45:13 AM PDT by Libloather
Missouri voters get shot at health care law
FROM STAFF AND WIRE REPORTS
Sunday, August 1, 2010
Show-Me State voters will be the first in the nation with an opportunity to pass judgment on the new federal health care law when more than 1 million people are expected to cast a ballot Tuesday on Proposition C.
The statewide ballot proposal attempts to reject the legislation’s core mandate that most Americans have health insurance. The legal effect of the measure is questionable because federal laws generally supersede state laws, but its passage could send an ominous political message to Democrats seeking to hang on to their congressional majority in this year’s midterm elections.
The Missouri measure, shepherded to the ballot by Republican state lawmakers, is a glaring example of the twisting, troubled politics surrounding the health overhaul. After years of campaigning for reform, Democrats finally accomplished it. Yet Democrats are largely silent and it is Republicans who are highlighting the law in their campaigns.
State Rep. Therese Sander, R-Moberly, told listeners at a recent forum co-hosted by the League of Women Voters and the Columbia Public Library that the proposition, also called the “Health Care Freedom Act,” is not so much about health care as it is a rejection of the federal government’s mandate that individuals and businesses purchase health insurance. She called the national health plan “Obamacare,” and charged that it is “ineffective, bureaucratic and costly.”
“It will put companies out of business, and the jobs and revenue we so desperately need will continue to disappear,” she said.
A year after raucous town-hall forums, and months after President Barack Obama signed it into law, the health care overhaul remains divisive and national polls differ on its popularity. A Kaiser Family Foundation poll found approval grew to 50 percent while disapproval shrunk to 35 percent in July. A Pew Research Center poll showed the opposite, with approval falling to 35 percent and disapproval rising to 47 percent.
In the swing state of Missouri, where Obama narrowly lost to Republican Sen. John McCain in the 2008 presidential elections, the federal health care law appears particularly unpopular.
Sixty-one percent of respondents to a Mason-Dixon poll conducted this month for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and TV station KMOV said they opposed the federal health care law. Opinion generally split along party lines, but among the key category of independents, 65 percent said they disapproved.
If passed by voters, the proposed Missouri law would prohibit governments from requiring people to have health insurance or from penalizing them for paying health bills entirely with their own money. That would clash with a key provision of the new federal law requiring most Americans to have health insurance or face fines starting in 2014.
At the recent candidate forum at the Columbia Public Library, Columbia attorney and former state Rep. Tim Harlan said he was sorry the measure is on Tuesday’s ballot. He said the initiative and the energy that it took to create it was a waste of time because Proposition C does nothing to address the state of health care or uninsured people.
“You need to work for the government to buy health insurance,” Harlan said, noting that state and federal legislators have enviable insurance coverage. “Beyond that, you’re on your own.”
While Sander said the Health Care Freedom Act would give Missourians the right to “opt out” of a federal insurance program, Harlan said the option would defeat the very aim of making insurance affordable for everyone.
“Everybody has to participate” in a national insurance plan to make it affordable, he said. “You can’t have a pool made up of sick people.”
Insurance reform is key to making health care affordable, Harlan said. “They’re in business to make money, not take care of people,” he said. “You don’t make money insuring sick people.”
Sander said Proposition C would simply give Missourians a choice.
“The nation is going to watch the outcome of the Health Care Freedom Act on Aug. 3,” she said. “All eyes are on Missouri.”
Similar measures are to appear as state constitutional amendments on the November ballot in Arizona, Florida and Oklahoma. And similar laws already have been enacted — without statewide votes — in Arizona, Georgia, Idaho, Louisiana and Virginia.
Supporters hope the state measures will provide ammunition for court challenges over the constitutionality of the federal health insurance mandate.
But "unconstitutional" federal laws, such as this one which does NOT exercise a delegated power, have no such force.
Alas, we need some turnover in federal courts and more judges who will recognize those powers are specific and limited, and that "interstate commerce" was never a clause intended do do more than facilitate trade and movement between the otherwise sovereign republics which comprise the United States.
But more power to those states who are actually willing to fight for their rightful standing in the union. Oregon, which I left three weeks ago, is actually dedicating taxpayers' resources to the federal government's side of this fight which is about to commence.
Opponents of Prop C are mailing out TOTALLY MISLEADING flyers that are meant to fool the ignorant into voting NO. I’ve had three days worth of flyers so far. Each misdirects the voter as to the result of their vote.
This here is your 787 billion dollar “stimu-slush fund” financing full color, expensive, lying, fear-mongering political slander.
Do the right thing, Missouri!
What are the real chances, does anyone know?
The media loves to frame things in terms of popularity, and of course the folks who want to believe we are a democracy just eat it up. But that is NOT the correct argument. The federal legislative body is representative and it is a part of their job to enact laws they believe are necessary even when most of the people do not like it.
The real and meaningful argument against this legislation is that it is NOT within the federal government's specific and limited powers to do most of what this legislation aims to do. Whether or not the citizens like it or want it.
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