Obama’s New “Waiver Flexibility” Plan To States Is Path To Single Payer Faster

What do you do when your signature piece of legislation has been ruled by two federal courts as unconstitutional, was passed against the will of the people, is massively unpopular by voters, and was responsible for the biggest mid-term election sweep against the party in power in decades? You act like you’ve heard the concerns and are willing to scale it back. Some. Except you don’t really mean it and except that your proposal is worse than meaningless window dressing.

While the Obama administration has handed out hundreds of ObamaCare waivers to corporations (especially those willing to play ball with it), it recently has heard the calls from beleaguered states who are overwhelmed with Medicaid expenses as is, and will be completely ransacked by the full implementation of ObamaCare. So, the other day, at a meeting with the nation’s governors, President Obama offered a plan to allow the states “flexibility” and which would move up the date by which they could opt out. But, as Conn Carroll at The Heritage Foundation’s The Foundry/Morning Bell blog points out in detail, the proposal only offers “flexibility” in the time it would take to get to a single-payer system (i.e., a complete government takeover).

There’s nothing like a disingenuous proposal to keep the people off your back. While supporters of the proposal, sponsored by Senators Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) and Scott Brown (R-Massachusetts), would allow the states some flexibility, it comes with many strings attached, not the least of which is our favorite: Any exemptions to ObamaCare as currently maintained in the law would have to come from the Secretary of Health and Human Services — one more power to the thousands that office currently holds under ObamaCare. Talk about czars!

Meanwhile, as Ben Smith reports at Politico, at the same time the president was selling this “flexibility” package with the governors — which, he maintains, would allow them to introduce market-based solutions — his health care advisors were on a conference call with liberal activists extolling the real aims of the plan: It would allow “blue” states to get to single payer faster.

Here’s how Heritage’s Center for Policy Innovation Director Stuart Butler described it in the New England Journal of Medicine:

One [problem] is that [Wyden-Brown] still locks the states into guaranteeing a generous and costly level of benefits. True, a state could propose alternative benefit requirements if they had the same actuarial value as those in the [health care bill]. But the requirements go well beyond basic coverage, and the HHS secretary is the one who defines “at least as comprehensive” benefits. …

Not much of a move to the middle, not much of a compromise, not much of a remedy to the states. Not much of anything at all . . . except another duplicitous front opened up by the administration to misdirect the public about the true intentions of ObamaCare.