Massive Resistance Watch: The View from The Roasterie LXXXI: January 23, 2014
Fifty years from now which will play worse in historical memory: the conservative southern Democrats' massive resistance to try to civil rights in the 1950s and the 1960s or the conservative Republicans' massive resistance to their poorer fellow-citizens getting health insurance in the 2010s?
I cannot tell. I do, however, think that history will judge the second as stupider: practically everyone has somebody uninsured or at risk of rapidly becoming uninsured in their extended family, and throwing federal Medicaid and exchange subsidy dollars down the toilet does run a measurable risk--10%? 20%? 50%?--of send the red state economies as a group back into recession over the next two years.
But things aren't all going their way. Sy Mukherjee reports:
Sy Mukherjee: Federal Judge Temporarily Blocks Missouri's Restrictions On Obamacare Navigators: "Obamacare uses so-called state navigators and enrollment counselors to assist Americans who are looking to buy health plans....
Although navigators have to be federally certified, the health law allows states to impose additional requirements.... 19 states generally opposed to the Affordable Care Act have passed such laws--and some states’ navigator requirements are so stringent that advocates say they prevent counselors from fulfilling their very purpose.... Missouri’s navigator law... prohibits federally certified navigators from discussing specific marketplace plans unless they also become state-licensed insurance brokers.... “Missouri has placed groups like St. Louis Effort for AIDS in an untenable situation,” said plaintiff’s counsel and former Missouri insurance commissioner Jay Angoff when he filed the lawsuit last winter....
Judge Ortrie Smith agreed... concludes HIMIA’s requirement that federally approved/licensed individuals and entities must also comply with additional licensing requirements constitutes an impermissible obstacle.... “[T]he suggestion that those designated to operate the [Obamacare marketplace] can do so only if they are also licensed as insurance agents demonstrates that the state law obstructs the federal purpose.”
A federal judge in Tennessee temporarily blocked a similar law in that state in October...
