Idaho on Wednesday became the first state to pass a law saying no thanks to part of President Obama’s health care proposal.
The Idaho Health Care Freedom Act says in part, “every person within the state of Idaho is and shall be free to choose or decline to choose any mode of securing health care services without penalty or threat of penalty.”
Gov. C.L. “Butch” Otter, a Republican, said Wednesday he signed it because he believes any health care laws should ensure people are “treated as an individual, rather than as an amorphous mass whose only purpose in this world is to obey federal mandates.”
Several other states may follow suit.
Proposals like this, attacking the individual mandate but also health care reform in general, have been introduced in 36 states with almost identical language. ALEC, a right-wing outfit that feeds legislative language to state Republican lawmakers, basically wrote these bills. And I’d expect the well-funded legal arm of the conservative movement to fight to block implementation of the federal bill, taking it all the way to the Supreme Court if necessary. Whether they would have the votes to essentially reopen the nullification issue is unclear. But we’ll almost certainly get an answer on this before the exchanges and the individual mandate get set into place.
