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How to Defund ObamaCare? Let Us Count the Ways
Michael Cannon, director of health policy studies at the Cato Institute, wrote an article that appeared in Forbes last week that detailed four options for defunding ObamaCare. The four ways are summarized below. Click here to read the original piece.
- Stop Medicaid expansion in the states: According to Cannon, "the Medicaid expansion would account for roughly half of the law's $2 trillion of new entitlement spending over the first 10 years." States that choose not to accept the Medicaid expansion then are blocking the expenditure of money the federal government built into its projected outlays for ObamaCare.
- Get states, employers, and citizens to challenge the IRS's illegal ObamaCare taxes: According to ObamaCare as it was written, the federal government can only issue subsidies to states that created exchanges. The architects of the law assumed that by withholding the susbsides for states that refuse to set up exchanges, states would consider that an incentive to set up their own exchanges. That did not happen, and 34 states have refused to set up their own exchanges. Illegally, the federal government has created the exchanges in these 34 states and as Cannon writes, "the IRS is trying to impose those taxes and issue those subsidies in those 34 states anyway. The IRS is literally trying to spend more than $700 billion without congressional authorization..." There are currently four lawsuits targeting the illegal taxes.
- Educate states about how to block the IRS's illegal taxes legislatively: Cannon suggests that the 34 states who have refused to set up ObamaCare's insurance exchanges legislatively move to suspend the licenses of insurers that accept the illegal subsidies. This would motivate insurers not to accept the illegal subsidies, and then employers in those states could not "be hit with the employer-mandated penalties those subsidies trigger," according to Cannon.
- Urge House investigators to subpoena all materials related to the IRS's illegal taxes: Under Chairman Darrell Issa, the House Oversight and Government Reform committee has been investigating the illegal taxes mentioned above for a year. Cannon includes the video below of a July 2013 testimony in front of the House Oversight and Government Reform committee hearing from a political appointee responding to inquiries about the illegal taxes.
 | | Issa Demands Treasury Docs Related to Questionable Expansion of ObamaCare Taxes and Subsidies |
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