National Review | Loyola: Beware Feds Bearing Gifts

WILL Senior Fellow Mario Loyola writing in National Review:

“Critics of Wisconsin governor Scott Walker are mystified that the state is suing the federal government for a few tens of million dollars under an insurer tax in Obamacare, while turning down hundreds of millions under the law’s Medicaid expansion. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel recently reported that the comparison is “not lost on advocates who support the law.”

Actually, a lot of the comparison is lost on them, and that’s too bad. It would considerably improve our national conversation if supporters of Obamacare had a better understanding of why the law’s critics dislike it so much. Here is one reason: The intermingling of federal and state finances is rife with opportunities for the federal government to coerce states into doing things they don’t want to do, in areas where their autonomy is supposed to be protected by the Constitution. And Obamacare is particularly rife with examples of such coercion, of which the insurer tax and Medicaid expansion are only two.”

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