SJR 1: OHIO GENERAL ASSEMBLY TAKES QUICK AIM AT HEALTH REFORM BEFORE SUMMER

With the Ohio General Assembly poised to send the next biennial budget to the Governor by week’s end and depart on summer recess, Republican leaders are taking steps to pass a resolution that would place the Ohio Tea Party “Health Care Freedom Amendment” on the November ballot. This would be the back-up move if the “Ohio Project” petition initiative fails to gather enough signatures to get on the ballot.

The Freedom Amendment language is incorporated into Senate Joint Resolution 1, which passed the Ohio Senate on June 15^th.  SJR1 would place on the Ohio ballot, this coming November, a constitutional amendment to kill the so-called “Individual Mandate” in the Affordable Care Act. SJR1  passed with the three-fifths majority needed to put it on the ballot.

On Wednesday, June 22, the House Health Committee will likely vote the amendment out of committee and send it to the full House for a vote. But supporters lack the needed three-fifths majority if the vote falls along party lines

WHY DOES THIS MATTER?

The Individual Responsibility Requirement (“mandate”) is the ACA’s key to providing affordable coverage to people with pre-existing conditions.

If the Individual Mandate were invalidated, the insurance industry would wage an all-out attack on the insurance reforms going into effect in 2014, which require them to sell insurance to all comers regardless of health status. They fear – and most health economists agree – that if the market were flooded with people having health problems, insurance premiums would rise and healthy people would drop out of the market, thus driving premiums higher – the so-called “death spiral”. The individual mandate keeps everyone in the insurance pool and spreads the cost of the relatively few high users over the whole population. It’s the way insurance works. Car insurance rates keep from skyrocketing because all drivers are required to have it and relatively few people crash.

Making insurance available and affordable to people with pre-existing conditions was the single most popular issue driving national health reform, according to many polls. Attacking the Individual Mandate reverses the public’s will, whether many voters know it or not.

REPEALING THE INDIVIDUAL MANDATE – GALVANIZING POLITICS - BAFFLING POLICY

The attack on the Individual Mandate is, in reality, the galvanizing issue by which to attack the ACA. It makes for great messaging:  the government is trying to force people to purchase health coverage, or else. The “or else” is that people who fail to purchase coverage or obtain an exemption from the mandate (on one of many grounds) will receive a civil penalty from the IRS – in other words, a tax. Medicare, the wildly popular health coverage for seniors and people with disabilities, is also funded by a tax imposed on all working people – but you don’t see any petition drives to end that mandate.

The attack on the individual mandate has been so effective that most people know little else about the ACA except the mandate.

If the public really understood what they have to gain from the ACA would they really want to throw out the protections for young adults, the end of lifetime caps, tax credits for small businesses, shrinking the Medicare doughnut hole – let alone the massive coverage expansion and improved health insurance market in 2014? Or the many provisions aimed at improving health care quality while driving down costs?

And the most baffling question of all – will Governor Kasich, whose Medicaid budget relies on several ACA provisions to achieve his goals of improving care and reducing costs, veto SJR 1 if it comes to his desk?