Dear Liberty Activist.....

[HARDCORE]

March 4, 2021

Dear Liberty Activist,

Click here to urge the Senate to oppose Xavier Becerra for Health and Human Services Secretary and to oppose the public option without a vote of Congress!

President Joe Biden has nominated former California Attorney General and Congressman Xavier Becerra to be the next Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and with his long history of supporting single payer socialized medicine in the form of Medicare for all, the danger is that what Biden cannot achieve legislatively to create the public option he campaigned on, he will delegate to Becerra to achieve via regulation.

One key area of the Obamacare statute is that the HHS Secretary oversees Section 1332 and Section 1115 waivers that states can utilize federal funding to expand coverage or offer new types of health plans, such as for state-level public options — all without any Congressional approval.

Using a combination of these waivers, Vermont in the early 2010s was poised to set up a single payer option, and only budgetary limits in the law prevented it from coming to fruition. “They gave us all the waivers we needed to get it done,” said former Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin, speaking with the New York Times’ Sarah Kliff in December, who gave up on the plan when the state considered the tax increases that would be necessary to implement it.

Under federal law, HHS-issued waivers have to be budget neutral, meaning whatever plan a state comes up with cannot cost more than what the federal taxpayers would otherwise pay for Medicare, Medicaid and Obamacare subsidies, and so the Vermont plan was scrapped.

But that was then. Now, with Becerra at the HHS helm, the Biden administration could be looking for ways around that, using budget accounting gimmicks via new regulatory guidance to allow for deficit-spending upfront.

For example, Dylan Scott at Vox.com in Nov. 2020 proposed that the “Biden administration could conceivably take a looser interpretation of budget neutrality. Maybe, to float one example, the program only needs to be budget-neutral by the end of a 10-year window, but could run deficits in the earlier years of the program. While the new president might not want to be seen as a big-spending Democrat, based on some comments from his close advisers, this more flexible approach may be what is necessary to achieve substantive change without any cooperation from Congress.”

Similarly, in Dec. 2020, the New York Times’ Sarah Kliff wrote, “An enterprising health secretary, working in partnership with a state, could also go even further. Some experts believe that a combination of Medicare, Medicaid and Affordable Care Act waivers could allow a state to build a single-payer plan with all of its federal health dollars.”

With the U.S. Senate so closely divided and the Senate filibuster still in place, if it cannot be achieved legislatively, his administration might have to resort to this sort of budget chicanery to achieve the objective — which is where Becerra would have to come in.

You know what to do! Let’s get on Voter Voice and urge the Senate to reject Xavier Becerra as Health and Human Services Secretary and send a message to President Biden that if he wants a public option, he has to go through Congress — and not resort to executive action to impose socialized medicine on the American people.

Here, Scott and Kliff are proposing via trial balloon to radically reinterpret 42 U.S. Code § 18052(a)(1)(B)(ii), which currently states that in order to qualify for a state innovation waiver requires “a 10-year budget plan for such plan that is budget neutral for the Federal Government”.

The law is very clear. Budget neutral means budget neutral. If a state does not have the tax dollars to pay for socialized medicine, then it’s illegal to grant the waiver. Biden and Becerra would do well to remember that.

Let’s keep fighting!

For Liberty,

RobertRomanoSignature.png
Robert Romano
Vice President of Public Policy
Americans for Limited Government
https://www.votervoice.net/ALG/campaigns/81757/respond