Commentary

The new insurance/health care bureaucracy burrowing its way into the Idaho soil celebrated its claim to signing-up some 76,000 Idahoans to an ObamaCare policy. This is a strange thing to be celebrating.  The fact that the State of Idaho is engaged in such self-congratulatory behavior demonstrates one of the most pernicious dynamics at play in the Legislature’s decision to partner with Barack Obama in remaking America’s health care system.

Sen. Russ Fulcher correctly blasted the claimed achievement, pointing out that Idaho is going backwards in the feigned attempt to “cover the uninsured”: While there may be 76,000 Idahoans now bound to an ObamaCare policy – some 105,000 Idahoans have lost their insurance. Only people in government could celebrate the apparent net loss of some 30,000 Idahoans’ access to affordable health care as a “good” thing, particularly when the ostensible goal of the whole enterprise is to help people get insurance.

Fulcher also points out that premiums are beginning to rise, and businesses are facing more perilous operating costs at a time of economic stagnation.

But Fulcher missed one of the darkest aspects of the Idaho ObamaCare Exchange: abortion access is easier and likely expanding because of the Obama Mandate now being peddled by Idahoans for Idahoans.

The policies being sold the “Idaho” Exchange require the purchase of insurance coverage for abortion causing drugs like “Plan B” and Ella.

As we warned during the legislature’s consideration of Governor Otter’s proposal to partner with President Obama, Idaho has become complicit in the evil spewing forth from the Obama Regime. Employers must now provide these drugs, and the state of Idaho is intimately involved.

To make matters worse: We learned late in the last session that you and I – as taxpayers – are being forced to pay for these drugs as part of the group insurance plan covering public employees.

This is the direct result of the Legislature’s failure in 2013 to adopt our Religious Liberty Amendment, which would have protected employers from being forced to pay for abortion-causing drugs.

Granted, Otter is correct when he says that this would be happening anyway through a pure federal insurance exchange. The difference is that Idaho would not be morally compromised by this situation. And sometimes the only choice available to us is to refuse to cooperate with evil.

Which brings us back to the celebrations surrounding the apparent success of the Idaho ObamaCare Exchange: These people are now deeply invested in making this work, in imposing the new federal rules on Idaho families and employers. It is impossible to imagine that they could ever be persuaded to blow the thing up if we ever succeed at freeing ourselves from ObamaCare.