Following the GOP takeover of the U.S. House of Representatives, there has been speculation about how The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act – also known as “ObamaCare” – could be delayed through federal legislation.
“There is a lot of ways through the purse strings that Obamacare could be thwarted,” said Mike Maharrey, communications director for the Tenth Amendment Center. “You defund all the agents that are necessary to enforce it and it becomes a shell.”
Michael Tanner, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and an expert on health care, said there is little chance of repealing the federal health care act while President Barack Obama is still in office.
But the individual mandate that every citizen must have health care by 2014 is being used as an example of a way to block its implementation. The IRS is expected to add 16,500 additional people for enforcement. There are no criminal penalties for not paying the fine for foregoing the mandate.
In an online article, Nina Owcharenko, director of health policy studies at The Heritage Foundation, wrote that one way to disable the health care law is to not pay for the extra IRS employees needed to enforce the individual mandate.
“Block. The most straightforward approach to blocking the new law is for Members of Congress to stop funding for key provisions. For example, they could prohibit funding from going toward the Internal Revenue Service for enforcing the individual mandate.”
Elsewhere, she has written that there are other ways to stop federal health care without funding.
Noting that the President has said that premiums would go down with the passage of the federal health care bill, she suggests that legislators could pass a bill stating that the federal health care bill will not be enacted until there is a track record that premiums are going down.
And a new report states that health care is getting more expensive.
“Let’s make sure we are meeting goals before forcing Americans to buy insurance they may not be able to afford,” Owcharenko said.
Michigan Capitol Confidential is the news source produced by the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. Michigan Capitol Confidential reports with a free-market news perspective.