Bizarre Bill #3

Because Republicans hate the idea of the government telling private businesses what they cna and cannot do, it's Missouri State Senator John Lamping, and his anti-Obamacare bill!


According to the St Louis Post-Dispatch:

The bill would suspend insurance companies’ state licenses if they accepted subsidies offered by the federal government to help pay health insurance premiums for low- and middle-income Missourians.

Yes, you will lose your ability to do business in the great state of Missouri if you commit the grave offense of cooperating with the government of the USA. How does that make sense? Hell if I know. But I'm sure Lamping has a perfectly reasonable rationale for his bill.

Lamping contends the subsidies are illegal and eventually will be thrown out by a federal court. 

And which court is this that will overrule the goddamn Supreme Court of the United Fucking States of America?

 

Lamping contends the subsidies are illegal and eventually will be thrown out by a federal court. By rejecting them, he said, Missouri could remove the trigger in the federal law that, beginning in 2015, will assess penalties against large employers that don’t provide health insurance.

And if that doesn't work, he plans to hold his breath until he turns blue!

 

I mean, seriously, how the hell is that even supposed to work? You forbid insurance companies from accepting federal funds, then that somehow prevents the federal government from enforcing other parts of its law? Is that it? Because I really don't understand how that's supposed to work.

“This is a legislative way by which the state actually could push back” against the law, Lamping said.

No. It isn't.

 Where in the hell would Lamping get such a cockamamie idea?

Lamping said he got the idea for his bill suspending the insurers’ licenses from Michael Cannon, a health policy scholar at the libertarian Cato Institute in Washington.

Ohhhhh, the Cato Institute. I'm sure this Cato Institute guy isn't a total nut or anything.

 Cannon traveled the country, encouraging states not to set up insurance exchanges. He argued that employers would have a solid legal foundation to contest any penalties in states with federally run exchanges.

Yes, even though the Supreme Court has found the Affordable Care Act Constitutional in its entirety, I'm sure that you will have a solid legal foundation from which to challenge it. Yeah, this is totally the guy you want to take advice from.

 Lamping said the Tenth Amendment group “has sorta latched onto this. They think it’s a vehicle for the issues that are important to them, the idea of nullification. It’s far more simple than that. It’s mandating that the insurance companies follow state statutes and follow federal statutes.”

Wait, what? Forbidding your insurers from following Federal Law is "mandating that they follow federaal statutes?" Do you even listen to yourself when you talk?

Guess what Lefty-Liberal rag had this headline?

West Virginia Chemical-Spill Site Avoided Broad Regulatory Scrutiny

Contamination Highlights Gaps in Regulations, Prompts Questions on Potential Threats

Give up?








Yep.
The Wall Street Freakin Rupert-Murcoch-Owned Journal.

The WALL STREET JOURNAL thinks there are "gaps" in regulations. Do you have any idea how lax your regulatory climate has to be for the WSJ to think there are gaps and that there are questions? Because their default position is to scream about over-regulation crippling American Industry and Freedommmmm!!!

Now one rarely says this about a Murdoch-owned paper, but the Journal does have a point.

 

The site of a West Virginia chemical spill that contaminated the water supply for 300,000 people operated largely outside government oversight, highlighting gaps in regulations and prompting questions on whether local communities have a firm grasp on potential threats to drinking water.

 The storage facility owned by Freedom Industries Inc. on the banks of the Elk River was subject to almost no state and local monitoring, interviews and records show. The industrial chemical that leaked into the river, 4-methylcyclohexane methanol, isn't closely tracked by federal programs. A state regulator had said earlier that, before last week's spill, environmental inspectors hadn't visited the site since 1991. 

1991! How the hell could they go 24 years without an inspection? They're not a fertilizer plant!

 

 Too soon?

 So how could this happen?

Matthew Blackwood, chairman of a county-level group that develops local emergency-response plans, said Sunday the group didn't know that stores of the chemical were sitting upriver from the area's largest water-treatment plant.

"We definitely had not thought of water contamination on this scale," he said Sunday. "I don't want to overregulate private industry, but this does show that there are some chemicals that fall under the radar."

Ohhh. I see. This chemical company just poisoned the drinking water of thousands of people and you're concerned about OVER-regulating. Okay, now it makes sense. And that's a good a reason as any to expect that this kind of shit will continue to happen again and again.