The conservative fight against the president’s health-care law isn’t over, said Jason Millman in Politico.com. The Republican governors of 30 states are now presenting a “unified front to sink Obamacare,” confirming this week they will refuse to set up health-care exchanges—the marketplaces in which 25 million uninsured Americans will shop for subsidized health-insurance plans starting in October 2013. The federal government will be obliged to set up exchanges in those states itself, but it’s far from clear whether it is equipped to handle “millions of enrollments, questions from confused customers, and greater health-plan oversight.” Business is resisting Obamacare, too, said Grace-Marie Turner in Forbes. Some companies are cutting workers to part-time hours to avoid the law’s mandate that all full-time employees be covered. Six million Americans, meanwhile, are expected to refuse to buy insurance when the individual mandate takes effect in 2014. “The Obamacare Resistance Movement has begun.”
“Obamacare is here to stay,” said Greg Sargentin WashingtonPost.com. That makes the governors’ obstruction not only unprecedented, but undemocratic. How can elected officials deliberately try to make the health-care system “work less effectively for their own constituents”? Once Americans see how effective the exchanges are in the 18 states that are complying, they’ll demand that their obstructionist governors reconsider. The “irony of ironies,” said E.J. Dionne, alsoin The Washington Post, is that, by refusing to set up exchanges, these conservative governors are surrendering state control, and “giving liberals something far closer to the national system they hoped for.”
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