President 2012: Mitch Daniels Lays ObamaCare on the Presidential Table

Mitch Daniels is going right after President Obama and his hallmark ObamaCare legislation in a WSJ piece today.

Unless you’re in favor of a fully nationalized health-care system, the president’s health-care reform law is a massive mistake. It will amplify all the big drivers of overconsumption and excessive pricing: “Why not, it’s free?” reimbursement; “The more I do, the more I get” provider payment; and all the defensive medicine the trial bar’s ingenuity can generate.

All claims made for it were false. It will add trillions to the federal deficit. It will lead to a de facto government takeover of health care faster than most people realize, and as millions of Americans are added to the Medicaid rolls and millions more employees (including, watch for this, workers of bankrupt state governments) are dumped into the new exchanges.

Many of us governors are hoping for either a judicial or legislative rescue from this impending disaster, and recent court decisions suggest there’s a chance of that. But we can’t count on a miracle—that’s only permitted in Washington policy making. We have no choice but to prepare for the very real possibility that the law takes effect in 2014.

For state governments, the bill presents huge new costs, as we are required to enroll 15 million to 20 million more people in our Medicaid systems. In Indiana, our independent actuaries have pegged the price to state taxpayers at $2.6 billion to $3 billion over the next 10 years. This is a huge burden for our state, and yet another incremental expenditure the law’s authors declined to account for truthfully.

Perhaps worse, the law expects to conscript the states as its agents in its takeover of health care. It assumes that we will set up and operate its new insurance “exchanges” for it, using our current welfare apparatuses to do the numbingly complex work of figuring out who is eligible for its subsidies, how much each person or family is eligible for, redetermining this eligibility regularly, and more. Then, we are supposed to oversee all the insurance plans in the exchanges for compliance with Washington’s dictates about terms and prices.

Read it all.

Republican Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels makes the case on why ObamaCare SHOULD be repealed, but if it is NOT then how to CHANGE it. Today’s piece is a blueprint to run for the Presidency in 2012.

Daniels has chosen an issue that President Obama will have to defend as well as GOP Presidential front-runner Mitt Romney. It is a two-fer.

All the Republican candidates considering a White House bid in the next two years have sought to distinguish themselves from challengers when it comes to healthcare reform. The issue is expected to be one of the defining ones in the Republican presidential primary.

It’s understood that the candidates will be unanimous in calling for the law’s repeal, but Daniels wrote about the possibility it might be sustained, and laid out a game plan to undercut the law short of its full repeal.

Next, Mitch goes to CPAC and goes into the conservative arena – one which Sarah Palin has for five years avoided.