Tuesday, the General Assembly voted to pass a scaled-back version of House Bill 707 to circumscribe the Obamacare debacle. The final bill was not ideal; however, politics is the art of the possible, and I will claim victory nevertheless.
I am resolved next year to strengthen Georgia’s quarantine against Obamacare with provisions to prohibit the commissioner of insurance from enforcing its bewildering health care insurance prescriptions, and to curtail the payment of fees levied on health insurance policies for state or local government employees.
Jobs are vanishing. Health insurance premiums are climbing. Health care choices are shrinking. Error-plagued electronic enrollment remains vexing. And federal and state government health care expenditures continue soaring. The initial victory we scored Tuesday would have been impossible without the tireless work of Carolyn Cosby and Georgians for Health Care Freedom. They gathered more than 37,000 signatures and voiced concerns to lawmakers.
A legislative overdose to cure all of Obamacare’s infirmities in one bill would have been deadly. Thus, I accepted this version of HB 707 (now part of House Bill 943), which was short of my ambition to prevent the federal government from commandeering any resource of state or local government to promote, enforce, or administer Obamacare. As passed by the Georgia General Assembly, the bill’s prohibitions are threefold.
No state or local officer or employee on government time or with government resources is permitted to advocate for the expansion of Medicaid. The Medicaid program already places a crippling burden on the state budget. Further expansion would be fiscally prohibitive.
The legislation also prohibits the state from establishing or operating a health insurance exchange to administer or implement Obamacare. The federal government will be obligated to use its own money and resources to establish a federal health insurance exchange in Georgia and will be held politically accountable for incompetence in its operation or administration.
My bill further prohibits any department or agency of the state or political subdivision from using any funds — federal, state or local — to operate so-called “navigator” programs to encourage or assist persons to enroll in Obamacare.
I was disappointed that deleted from HB 707 in the Georgia Senate was a landmark provision, passed twice by the House of Representatives, to prohibit the commissioner of insurance from investigating, enforcing or adjudicating health insurance claims arising under the health insurance prescriptions of Obamacare. The provision is necessary to hold the federal government accountable for its legislative or administrative follies that evoke popular wrath and prevent hiding behind state officials.
Democrats took great legal risks in passing Obamacare. It escaped constitutional death by a single vote in the U.S. Supreme Court. Republicans must be no less bold in confronting the never-ending encroachments on liberty of the federal leviathan.
State Rep. Jason Spencer, R-Woodbine, represents District 180.
