Lt. Gov. enters federal health care constitutional challenge
TOPEKA — The lieutenant governor on Tuesday announced Kansas was stepping up its fight against the federal Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, what critics call Obamacare.
Kansas Lt. Gov. Jeff Colyer told a Johnson County Republican gathering Tuesday he has joined a brief filed by the Cato Institute that supports efforts by Kansas and 25 other states to overturn the federal Affordable Care Act health plan. The libertarian Cato Institute is an independent Washington, D.C., public policy research group.
The legislation would achieve universal coverage by requiring uninsured people, beginning in 2014, to buy health insurance. The state contends it oversteps constitutional boundaries by penalizing those who choose not to buy the coverage.
"As a practicing physician, I know first hand that if fully enacted, the Obama health care plan would harm the quality of patient care and devastate the Kansas budget," said Colyer, a surgeon and a lawyer.
Unchallenged, the federal plan threatens to devastate the finances of many small businesses, said Chuck Vogt, a co-owner of All-Star Awards and Ad Specialties, a Lenexa marketing materials producer.
Just the uncertainty over how the federal plan's required universal coverage might alter risks for medical insurance providers led All-Star's provider of 15 years to raise the premium costs for the 25-member workforce by more than 30 percent, Vogt said.
He and his partners shopped around and found a provider that quoted a package with increases that weren't as steep.
"We're still paying maybe 20 percent more; I don't remember the exact numbers," Vogt said. "And we're eating that, because we think it's the right thing to do."
"None of this had to happen," Vogt said. "I believe that the market will find ways to provide health care coverage a lot cheaper than the government will."
Colyer's action is the latest in a series of moves that he, Gov. Sam Brownback and a majority of Republicans in the Kansas Legislature have taken to contest the planned implementation of the 2009 federal health plan legislation.
Kansas is one of 45 states that either is challenging the federal health plan in court, has passed legislation to restrict its application within their borders, or done both, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
In January 2011, shortly after Brownback took office, the state joined a Florida lawsuit that contends requiring uninsured people to buy health coverage or pay penalties goes beyond what the interstate commerce clauses of the U.S. Constitution allow, and is coercive.
President Barack Obama's administration argues the plan is constitutional and the requirement is necessary to keep premiums affordable.
Two other states, Virginia and Ohio, filed separate suits in 2010 seeking to overturn the federal health plan legislation and those suits — like the Florida lawsuit that Kansas joined last year — are making their way through the federal court system toward what ultimately is expected to be a U.S. Supreme Court decision.
Supreme Court justices announced in November they would hear oral arguments in the Florida case March 26-28.
In Kansas, Brownback last August returned a $31 million federal grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to develop an online market exchange that insurance consumers would use to find and buy health insurance, much like travelers book airline or hotel reservations.
Brownback returned the money, saying the state would do nothing to implement the federal legislation until the Supreme Court in Washington decided.
Instead, Kansas will use $135 million to develop a new state computer system, called the Kansas Eligibility Enforcement System, or KEES, for centralizing Medicaid and other state-federal assistance programs. KEES also could be used to support some federal health care requirements if those are upheld by the Supreme Court.
About 90 percent of that money, or $121 million, will come from the federal government's Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and will meet Kansas' needs without requiring the establishment of the health exchanges, Colyer said when the system was announced.
But now, "there are a variety of opinions, even among conservatives, about whether that system is constitutional, too," said state Sen. Mary Pilcher-Cook, R-Shawnee.
"What we've got to do is pass the Kansas Health Care Freedom amendment (to the Kansas Constitution,) before the U.S. Supreme Court holds hearings in March," Pilcher-Cook said.
The amendment, designed to exempt Kansans from the federal plan's mandatory insurance coverage requirements, passed the Kansas House by a wide margin last year but was not voted on in the Kansas Senate, where it still awaits final action. Kansas is one of two dozen states where similar proposed state constitutional amendments offer alternatives or exemptions to the federal plan.
Passing the Kansas amendment before the Supreme Court hears oral arguments "would give our attorney general another tool to show how strongly we, the elected representatives of our people, feel the need for constitutional protection," she said.
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