Citizens' Council For Health Freedom Implores States To Resist Healthcare Exchanges

Supreme Court’s Ruling on Affordable Care Act Damages Americans’ Freedom; Only Way to Limit Damage is for States to Resist Implementation

Key Facts:

• The Supreme Court of the United States allows the Affordable Care Act (ACA) to stand, allows for individual mandate to be upheld as a tax.
• States can opt out of the expansion of Medicaid without penalty in order to protect their budgets.
• Refusal to implement government healthcare exchanges is the only way, short of Congressional repeal, to stop federal control of healthcare in the states.

The Supreme Court of the United States recently took the weakest option available with regard to the ACA: ruling the individual mandate constitutional while providing a loophole for states to opt out of the Medicaid expansion if they so choose. According to the Citizens’ Council for Health Freedom (CCHF), states can and should resist implementation of the government health exchanges that are the keystone of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

“This is, perhaps, the worst decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in recent history,” said Twila Brase, President of the Citizens’ Council for Health Freedom, who was in the Supreme Court as the ruling was read. “The Court has allowed an unconstitutional law to go forward and created a tax where none existed in law.”

Under the law as ruled on by the Supreme Court, states may, without reprisal from the federal government, refuse implementation of the state healthcare exchanges that are the keystone of the law. Such measures will erect barriers against implementation of the ACA and are the one of the only ways, short of Congressional repeal, to prevent negative consequences of the law from affecting individual states.

“As we’ve advised for months now, states must refuse creation of exchanges at all costs in order to limit the implementation of this unconstitutional law,” said Brase.

By allowing the ACA’s implementation, the Supreme Court voted to add more than $340B to the nation’s deficit and created $17T in long-term, unfunded liabilities, all of which will be very difficult to stop and undo should Congress later repeal the law.

But money is only a portion of the problem. In keeping the ACA law in place, the Supreme Court is allowing the U.S. government to have unprecedented access and control in the everyday, private health matters of millions of Americans. From networked state health exchanges that are all required to share information with the federal government to the lack of doctors and specialists due to inevitable consolidation of doctors’ practices to employers that drop employer-based insurance programs due to the heavy tax burdens of keeping it, the implementation of the ACA – which was touted as the world cure to health care access and affordability – in many cases creates the opposite of the desired effect.

“The refusal to overturn the ACA will have far-reaching implications that most Americans can hardly imagine,” said Brase. “The effects on healthcare will be devastating and when realized, it will be very difficult to reverse or countermand the effects.”

Twila Brase shares health care-related news with the American public in her daily, 60-second radio feature, Health Freedom Minute. Health Freedom Minute airs on the entire American Family Radio Network, with more than 150 stations nationwide, in addition to Bott Radio Network with over 80 stations nationwide. During the daily features, listeners can learn more about the agenda behind proposed health care initiatives and policies and what they can do to protect their health care choices, rights and privacy.

Brase, a public health nurse and health care freedom advocate, informs listeners of crucial health issues, such as the intrusive wellness and prevention initiatives in the ACA, patient privacy and the need for informed consent requirements, the dangers of “evidence-based medicine” and the implications of state and federal health care reform.

Health Freedom Minute is sponsored by the Citizens’ Council for Health Freedom, a patient-centered national health freedom organization. CCHF supports patient and doctor freedom, medical innovation and the right of citizens to a confidential patient-doctor relationship.

For more information about Citizens’ Council for Health Freedom or to sign up for the weekly CCHF Health eNews, visit www.cchfreedom.org.

SOURCE: Citizens’ Council for Health Freedom