Cato scholar: States should stop implementing Obamacare

March 2, 2011

The Cato Institute’s February 25 podcast urges governors of states which successfully challenged Obamacare in federal court to stop implementing the controversial healthcare law.

In the wake of U.S. District Judge Roger Vinson’s ruling that the law is unconstitutional, some governors, like Florida Gov. Rick Scott and Alaska Gov. Sean Parnell, have stopped all efforts to implement Obamacare in their states. Michael F. Cannon, Cato’s director of health policy studies, says those governors who continue to take steps to implement Obamacare (such as Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal) should stop doing so for three reasons:

If the governor believes the law is unconstitutional, then he is bound by his oath not only to challenge the law, but also to protect the Constitution by not implementing the unconstitutional law.
Everything done to implement the law makes it more difficult to repeal, roll back, or overturn Obamacare in the future.
Any money spent on implementing Obamacare is money that is being borrowed from future generations.
Cannon suggests that rather than continuing to facilitate the implementation of Obamacare, states should allow the judicial process to run its full course before taking any more action. Only if the constitutionality of the law has been fully litigated and Obamacare is found to be constitutional should state governors move forward.