A Non-Waiving Waiver of ObamaCare

One of the biggest flaws of the federal government's healthcare take-over reform law is its usurpation of the authority and power of the states via a serious overreach of the Commerce Clause. Possibly in anticipation of a Supreme overturning of the law on this particular basis, the Obama administration has now issued guidelines for states to obtain a waiver to the law.

The problem is that the conditions for obtaining a waiver look strangely familiar.

The plan is designed to improve flexibility for states as they implement health-care reform. But the waivers would only be granted if a state can provide coverage that is just as comprehensive and affordable as ACA's new health insurance exchanges. The state alternative must also cover as many people as ACA's plan.

States would also be required to maintain consumer protections that form the cornerstone of the law, even if they obtain a waiver.

"Cornerstone of the law", indeed. These conditions are all cornerstones of Obamacare!

If the conditions for a waiver are a recitation of the components of the law purportedly being waived, is it really a waiver? If it looks, walks and quacks like an onerous federal mandate, isn't it still a mandate and not really a waiver at all??

It is doubtful that everyone, including the Supreme Court, will be as easily duped by this non-waiver as the Obama admin seems to think. This is, after all, the administration that disregarded court ruling after court ruling to lift its offshore oil drilling moratorium under the flimsy cover of claiming - honest! we lifted it! - that it had done so despite their embarassing inability to point to ... you know, any actual drilling permits issued. (The administration has finally begun to end this moratorium over the last two weeks and only because it became clear that the president would take a political hit for not doing so in light of rising oil prices.)

Fortunately, unlike the question of to drill or not to drill, the potential lifting of ObamaCare will not rest quite so exclusively with an administration that seems too often motivated by a highly misguided sense of Doing What is Best for Mankind, no matter how overreaching, suffocating, impoverishing, destructive or unconstitutional that policy may turn out.