Amelia
Rookie
- Banned
- #21
The states would not have leverage. They could complain all they want but once they've let Obama into their house it will be a futile struggle to make any demands on him. The most they could get is extra time to accomplish what he wants them to do.
And as noted already, that will just make them accomplices in the budget-busting boondoggle which is already projected to cost three times as much money as Obama said it would, with no end in sight.
You and others on the right are such blind partisans, you cant even accept the truth being told you by a fellow conservative.
Hence the schism within the GOP now. Some of them have taken sort of a New Federalism approach, recognizing it's better to have an exchange under state control and customized to the state's preferences and environment. Holtz-Eakin's piece is especially interesting because he takes it even further, arguing that by turning their state markets over to the federal exchange they're actively, if unwittingly, supporting the creation of a framework for a hypothetical future single-payer system.
The other train of thought seems to be a vestige from the days when these governors (and apparently most of the Republican party) thought the ACA wouldn't even exist come 2013 because 1) the SCOTUS would throw it all out, and 2) when that failed, the election of Mitt Romney would put the final nail in the ACA's coffin. What a slam dunk that was. And when all that failed, they were left just sort of spinning their wheels and handing their exchanges over to the federal government by default, partly in a pouty way but partly because there's just no intellectual energy left among them to figure out what they should do. Which leaves them in the odd position of embracing and talking up a federal role.
It's fascinating to watch. I suspect some of these decisions will be useful fodder in the 2014 state-level elections.
"embracing and talking up a federal role"?
Who's embracing? Who is talking up?
I'm saying let Obama have it so that it's all on him when the sh*t hits the fan and the accounting comes and his lies are exposed. That's not embracing or talking up.