Since the Supreme Court ruled on Obamacare last June, the White
House and its allies in the media have diligently promoted the myth
that the decision was an unqualified victory for the supporters of
“reform.” In reality, the Supremes dealt the Obama administration
an important defeat on one of the two primary issues decided,
namely whether the federal government has the right to withhold all
matching funds from a state that fails to expand Medicaid according
to the dictates of the unpopular health care law.
Medicaid is a joint state-federal program, yet a provision of
Obamacare required the withholding of all federal funds from
noncompliant states. The plaintiffs argued that this was so
coercive that it amounted to an unconstitutional “commandeering” of
the states. Seven of the nine justices agreed. This victory,
despite the Court’s ruling that the individual mandate is somehow a
tax, was viewed by many as an opportunity for GOP governors to
thwart implementation of an integral component of the law.
To the disgust of Obamacare’s opponents, however, eight GOP
governors have nonetheless decided to comply with the law’s
Medicaid provision. Arizona’s Jan Brewer, Florida’s Rick Scott,
Michigan’s Rick Snyder, Nevada’s Brian Sandoval, New Jersey’s Chris
Christie, New Mexico’s Susana Martinez, North Dakota’s Jack
Dalrymple, and Ohio’s John Kasich have all caved. Even worse,
several of these people have been vocal opponents of Obamacare and
govern states that participated in the lawsuit that produced the
Court’s favorable ruling.
It’s difficult to decide who among them deserves the most scorn,
but an excellent candidate is Rick Scott. Governor Scott was
ostensibly one of Obamacare’s most stalwart opponents. He founded
Conservatives for Patients’ Rights, an organization allegedly
dedicated to promoting free-market alternatives to the expansion of
government-run health care and, as Kyle Peterson recently pointed
out, wrote an opinion
piece for The American Spectator specifically
denouncing Obamacare’s provision for Medicaid expansion.
Moreover, it was Scott’s state that led more than two dozen
others all the way to the Supreme Court in the successful bid to
have Obamacare’s Medicaid provision struck down. Nonetheless, on
February 20, Scott
announced that he had “wrestled” with the question in the
aftermath of the November election and ultimately decided that
Obamacare’s expansion of Medicaid “is a compassionate, common sense
step forward.” Like many politicians, in other words, Scott
wrestled with his conscience and the latter lost the bout.
Sadly, Scott’s venality is not unique among these GOP “leaders.”
The flip-flop of Ohio’s John Kasich is another profile in political
cowardice. It is not too much to say that Kasich won the
governorship of his state by aligning himself with the Tea Party
movement and vociferously denouncing Obamacare in countless stump
speeches, talk radio, and television appearances. Yet, in early
February, he caved on the Medicaid issue, saying that “It makes
great sense for the state of Ohio because it will allow us to
provide greater care with our own dollars.”
But Kasich, Scott, and the rest of these GOP opportunists know
full well that participation in Obamacare’s Medicaid scheme does
not “make sense.” They know it will lead to fiscal disasters in
every state that falls for this scam. The federal government will
inevitably cut back its financial contribution to the vast
expansion of Medicaid, leaving the states holding the fiscal bag.
Scott, Kasich, and their six accomplices will be out of office by
then, of course, leaving their hapless successors to clean up the
disaster.
In fact, the groundwork for a federal cutback on matching funds
is explicitly laid out in Obamacare. Avik Roy
explains, “For the first three years of the expansion, federal
taxpayers will pick up the full cost.… This 100 percent funding
rate will phase down to 95 percent in 2017, 94 percent in 2018, 93
percent in 2019, and 90 percent in 2020.” And, considering the deep
fiscal hole into which Obama is digging us, we hardly need to call
on Nostradamus to predict that Washington will welch on its 90%
commitment.
This will leave the states with millions of new Medicaid
enrollees and virtually no assistance from Washington to cover the
cost of their increasingly expensive health care, thus leaving them
with a choice between kicking poor people out of the program and
cutting other basic services. As Betsy McCaughey pointed
out last week, “Medicaid is already consuming a third or more
of many state budgets. States would literally have to stop funding
roads, public schools, and other essential services to pay for
Medicaid.”
What makes this so infuriating is that these Republican
governors are waving the white flag after winning a hard
fought legal battle in order to escape this very dilemma. The
Supreme Court ruled, by a 7-2 majority, that Obamacare’s Medicaid
mandate was unconstitutional. Comparing a conditional grant like
the federal contribution to Medicaid to a contract, the majority
put it thus: “The legitimacy of Congress’s exercise of the spending
power… rests on whether the State voluntarily and knowingly accepts
the terms of this contract.”
Now, putting their own political prospects ahead of the fiscal
health of their states, Governors Scott, Kasich, Brewer, Snyder,
Sandoval, Christie, Martinez, and Dalrymple have “voluntarily and
knowingly” accepted the terms of the contracts. Most of these eight
governors probably expect to be working in Washington as elected
officials or lobbyists when the bill comes due, and at least one
has his eye on the White House. With Republicans like these, who
needs Democrats?
Photo: UPI
