COMMENTARY Insurgents Conceive Mess

STATE LEGISLATORS CAN’T CONTEST FEDERAL LAW

Republican state Rep. Nate Bell of Mena declared last week that he and others were sent to Little Rock by their voters primarily to do one thing.

It was, he said, to oppose the federal health care reform law “by any means we could.”

But there are no means available to a state legislator in Arkansas to contest the federal health care law.

The United States Supreme Court could overturn the law’s individual mandate.

Congress could rework or repeal the law. A new Republican president in 2013 could champion repeal.

But an Arkansas state representative cannot do diddly.

Ask Mark Darr how his brave one-man Arkansas fight against “Obamacare” is going.

He is the Republican lieutenant governor. He got elected on a simple vow to go to Little Rock and stop that health care business and to sue over it himself if that was the only way.

He found he had no official standing to sue, since the office of lieutenant governor is powerless and pointless, a perfect void, a waste of good closet space. And he was advised even by Republican lawyers that he had no personal standing to sue either since he is not an aggrieved party, meaning one not covered by health insurance who resents being ordered to get insurance by thefederal government.

Yet Bell and about 25 or 30 legislative colleagues of the tea party persuasion fantasized last week that they had found a way.

The federal health care law allows states to set up, by January 2013, their own regulated system of mandated health care insurance exchanges. Lo and behold, money for that planning was contained via a federal grant in the broader appropriation bill for the state Insurance Department.

So this insurgent rightwing minority decided to vote against this entire agency budget until and unless the health exchange planning money was excised and the federal grant left on the table.

Because a three-fourths majority vote was required, they were effectively blocking the bill.

They were doing so even after Democrats amended companion legislation to try to oblige or appease them by saying the money would not be spent if the federal health care law was declared unconstitutional.

That was just as well.

The amendment was silly and superfluous.

We already know that Arkansas is part of the United States and that U.S.

Supreme Court rulings apply automatically even here.

It was unclear at this writing whether these misguided souls would cling to their foolishalliance and leave the Insurance Department without a budget, though a compromise appeared in the works by which the money would stay and the appropriation would get passed but the companion legislation would, sadly, go unpassed.

What was never unclear at all, though, was whether federal health care reform would proceed apace either way. It would so proceed. And that was precisely the point.

These obstructionists were angling to leave us with this perfectly fine mess: We would have no state Insurance Department to license and regulate the insurance industry and collect vital fees and premiums. And we would leave our door wide open for the federal government to set up our health care exchange for us because we were declining to exercise the option the feds gave us to set up the framework ourselves.

Let me repeat that for emphasis and clarity: We would invite, indeed demand, the very federal health care control that these tea-party insurgents professed to be against in the first place.

Gov. Mike Beebe, fortunately a bastion of experience and pragmatism, called the bluff. He has this thing about not wanting to take legislators off the hook for responsibility.

He was saying that, if these folks want no regulated insurance industry in the state and if they want to roll over for the federal health care exchange, then he would stand down and let the legislative branch have precisely what the legislative branch wanted.

There were two competing sets of talking points available. But there were three distinct advantages for the governor.

One was that legislators go home, but he stays in the Capitol with a bully pulpit. The second was that he can successfully make the case that he is the one actually fighting federal control. The third, a little lagniappe, was that he is exactly right on substance and they are exactly wrong.

You see, the smart thing is to plan for an eventuality, or an apparent inevitability, even if you abhor the thought of that eventuality or inevitability.

That’s the very clever essence of insurance, even in a state where a few legislators put insurance regulation at risk.

JOHN BRUMMETT IS A COLUMNIST FOR THE ARKANSAS NEWS BUREAU IN LITTLE ROCK.

Opinion, Pages 13 on 04/03/2011

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