November 29, 2012 11:22AM

ObamaCare Implementation News

By Michael F. Cannon

Here’s some ObamaCare implementation news from around the interwebs:

  • “Minnesota Facing Bigger Bill For State’s Health Insurance Exchange”: Kaiser Health News reports Minnesota has increased its spending projections for operating the state’s ObamaCare Exchange by somewhere between 35 – 80 percent for 2015. Spending on the Exchange will rise by another 19 percent in the following year.
  • The Wall Street Journal defends the 25 – 30 states that aren’t gullible enough to create an Exchange and therefore take the blame for ObamaCare’s higher‐​than‐​projected costs.
  • Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer (R) has announced she will not implement an Exchange. That creates another potential state‐​plaintiff, millions of potential employer‐​plaintiffs, and (by my count) 430,000 potential individual plaintiffs who could join Oklahoma attorney general Scott Pruitt in challenging the IRS’s illegal ObamaCare taxes. It also means that Arizona can start luring jobs away from tax‐​happy California. There are four Hostess bakeries in California that might be looking to relocate.
  • I’m enjoying a friendly debate with The New Republic’s Jonathan Cohn and University of Michigan law professor Samuel Bagenstos over whether the those taxes really do violate federal law and congressional intent (spoiler alert: they do). I owe Bagenstos a response.
  • PolitiFact Georgia rated false my claim that operating an ObamaCare Exchange would violate Georgia law. I explain here why it is indeed illegal for Georgia (and 13 other states) to implement an Exchange.
  • ThinkProgress​.org reports, “Romney’s Transition Chief Is Encouraging States To Implement Obamacare.” A better headline would have been, “Government Contractor Encourages More Government Contracts.”
  • The Washington Examiner editorializes, “In California…state regulators have warned…insurance premiums will rise by as much as 25 percent once the exchange comes online…That’s the best‐​case scenario.” And, “In 2014, seven Democratic Senate seats will be up for grabs in states Mitt Romney carried (Alaska, Arkansas, Louisiana, Montana, North Carolina, South Dakota and West Virginia). Unless Obama’s HHS bureaucrats pull off an unprecedented miracle of central planning, Obamacare could well sink Democrats again in 2014, the same way it did in 2010.”