While the president lauds Obamacare, passed nearly a year ago, he is focusing on the CBO’s claim that the bill is “budget neutral.” Enough accounting gimmicks, double counting of revenues, and even new taxes (including the soon to be repealed 1099 filing law) were added to the bill to make it score as neutral at the federal budget level. This, of course, didn’t take into account the $118 billion in unfunded mandates the president and the Democratic Congress handed to the states. To cover many of the uninsured that the bill provides for, the president and Congress basically passed the buck to the states.
States are begging the Obama administration for waivers, but the White House is unwilling to bend on the unfunded Medicaid mandates included in the bill. If states can implement other parts of the bill in their own way, so be it, but they are going to spend big on Medicaid if they want to comply with the federal law. That’s why many governors are simply not going to implement the law in their state.
According to a new study by the chairmen of the House and Senate commerce committees, nearly one in four Americans is on Medicaid, a program originally meant for the poor and destitute. Either Americans aren’t earning as much as they should be in real terms, the federal government is simply spending too much, or the costs of healthcare have been inflated beyond their historic proportions.
Over the next ten years, Medicaid will cost the federal government $4.4 trillion. Medicaid now accounts for a quarter of state budgets. CBO estimates for state spending on implementation of Obamacare have ballooned to $60 billion by 2021.
When Democrats and unionized public employees are wondering why GOP governors like Scott Walker and John Kasich are forced to alter public employee bargaining rights and cut state spending, they should thank their Washington D.C. “allies.” The mandates that have come down from D.C. Democrats have crippled state budgets and infringed on 10th Amendment rights in the process. The founders never meant for the federal government to impose mandates governing commerce in each state or the spending of each state. Interstate trade is all that is covered by the commerce clause; anything other than the layman’s definition of that phrase is government overreach, pure and simple. No doubt many states will be exercising their 10th Amendment rights to ignore Obamacare as the pure overreach that it is, as Governor Scott of Florida has already promised to do.
The unions, clinging like barnacles to state governments, are inefficient. That’s why only 6% of private sector employees are unionized. Can you imagine what the founders would have thought if they were faced with unions in their state and federal government workforces? Not a chance.
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