One of the lies told by advocates of the health care compact is that:

"The Health Care Compact [will render] Obamacare inoperable in states that join and pass replacement legislation. It is not, strictly speaking, repeal. It just allows member states to suspend its operation their states." 

The reason that this isn't true is that ObamaCare will do nothing with respect to the individual mandate. As AHEC has previously explained, the individual mandate is not part of federal health law. It is part of the federal tax code. The compact purports to gives states authority over health care law - but does nothing about tax law. So there is no way the compact can render the mandate or ObamaCare's job-killing tax hikes "inoperable." 

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For those who watched the November 2011 general election returns, the loss of Arizona State Senate President Russell Pearce in a recall election came as a shock to many.  Pearce, to be sure, was vocal about the issue of illegal immigration but he was also a leader in the push for the health care compact (SB 1592) in Arizona. 

Pearce was a cosponsor of the compact bill in Arizona, he shepherded it through the Arizona state legislature, and he voted for the health care compact. In fact, the health care compact would not have passed Arizona's legislature without Pearce's support. Fortunately, Governor Jan Brewer vetoed the bill before it could do damage to Arizona's state budget.

As AHEC has noted, the health care compact is very poor fiscal policy and lacks any semblance of health care reform. In Arizona alone, it would have resulted in $54.3 billion less federal funding for health care in Arizona over the coming decade than would occur under current law. The health care compact's funding formula would also have failed to keep pace with Arizona's baby-boom population, further exacerbating Arizona's fiscal challenges. 

The lesson to be learned from Senator Pearce's election loss is that the health care compact is not just bad policy, it also happens to be bad politics. The first state legislative leader to push for the compact lost his election the first time he faced the voters. If the need for fiscal sanity is not enough reason for state legislators to reject the health care compact, perhaps political survival will be.

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The Center for Immigration Studies has taken note of AHEC's recent analysis of the pitfalls of the Health Care Compact. One of those pitfalls is the fact the compact would allow states to ignore federal law and provide health care to illegal aliens.  As CIS notes the health care compact comes "[as] yet another risk that could add insult to injury."

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AHEC has recently completed an extensive fiscal and policy review of the Health Care Compact (HCC or compact), legislation that has been introduced in several states. The conclusion of our fiscal review of the HCC is that the compact's funding formula is fatally flawed and that it will shift $3 trillion of healthcare liabilities from the federal government onto the backs of the states. Our report even provides a break down of the fiscal shortfall that will be created in each state if the compact were to be widely adopted.

Ironically, the group pushing the HCC has confirmed AHEC's $3 trillion figure but has failed to inform state legislators of how this will impact their state's budget. It would be the height of fiscal irresponsibility for a state to pass the compact given the obvious flaws in the funding formula, particularly if a state does not have a plan in place to ensure that the state's most vulnerable citizens will not receive proper health care. Yet some states (Texas, Oklahoma, Georgia and Missouri) have done just that.

READ AHEC'S FULL REPORT ON THE HCC HERE.

AHEC has previously discussed the myriad of problems with the Health Care Compact.  You can read much of AHEC's previous work on the HCC in the following places:

1. AHEC's Blog: The Connection of the HCC to Efforts to Enact Socialized Medicine
2. AHEC's Blog: The HCC will lead to Taxpayer Funding of Abortions and Free HealthCare for Illegal Aliens
3. A Line of Sight: A Conservative Assessment of the HCC

If you are concerned about the implications of the Health Care Compact, please call your state legislators (especially in Tennessee, Wisconsin, Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan and tell them to oppose the Health Care Compact).

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I recently received an email that contained a quote from a character, Dr. Hendricks, in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged.  I had forgotten about that character but in rereading the quote found it to be profound in the context of ObamaCare and the Health Care Compact (HCC). 

As AHEC has detailed over the past few months, the people pushing the HCC are actually advocating for its adoption and telling states, like Vermont, that it will give them the funding to implement socialized medicine. From where I sit, socialism is an unimaginable evil that should never be adopted here in America. It is bad for patients and it is bad for doctors. It is bad for our nation and it is bad for the states. Anyone who would seek to advance a policy, such as the HCC, where the end result in any state could be socialized medicine can not possibly be a friend of freedom. 

This is what Ayn Rand's Dr. Hendricks had to say:

“I quit when medicine was placed under State control some years ago. Do you know what it takes to perform a brain operation? Do you know the kind of skill it demands, and the years of passionate, merciless, excruciating devotion that go to acquire that skill? That was what I could not place at the disposal of men whose sole qualification to rule me was their capacity to spout the fraudulent generalities that got them elected to the privilege of enforcing their wishes at the point of a gun. I would not let them dictate the purpose for which my years of study had been spent, or the conditions of my work, or my choice of patients, or the amount of my reward. I observed that in all the discussions that preceded the enslavement of medicine, men discussed everything—except the desires of the doctors. Men considered only the ‘welfare’ of the patients, with no thought for those who were to provide it. That a doctor should have any right, desire or choice in the matter, was regarded as irrelevant selfishness; his is not to choose, they said, but ‘to serve.’ That a man’s willing to work under compulsion is too dangerous a brute to entrust with a job in the stockyards—never occurred to those who proposed to help the sick by making life impossible for the healthy. I have often wondered at the smugness at which people assert their right to enslave me, to control my work, to force my will, to violate my conscience, to stifle my mind—yet what is it they expect to depend on, when they lie on an operating table under my hands? Their moral code has taught them to believe that it is safe to rely on the virtue of their victims. Well, that is the virtue I have withdrawn. Let them discover the kind of doctors that their system will now produce. Let them discover, in the operating rooms and hospital wards, that it is not safe to place their lives in the hands of a man they have throttled. It is not safe, if he is the sort of man who resents it—and still less safe, if he is the sort who doesn’t.”

Food for thought.  I think I know that Rand would reject the HCC.  I wish thinking conservatives would do the same.

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