ELECTION PREVIEW: Amendment 63, health care choice
Amendment 63, also known as the “Health Care Choice” amendment, takes point-blank aim at the federal health care reform mandate requiring people to have health insurance.
The amendment, initiated by a Golden organization that advocates for limited government, would make health care choice a “right,” restrict the state from limiting people’s ability to directly pay for health care services and prohibit the state from requiring or enforcing requirements that its citizens participate in any health plan.
“The federal government is taking away our decisions over health insurance and, unprecedented in history, forcing citizens to purchase private products, ultimately under penalty of incarceration,” according to Jon Caldara, president of the Independence Institute, who spearheaded the Amendment 63 drive. “We at the Independence Institute refuse to watch this atrocity corrode the quality of healthcare in Colorado.”
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But if the amendment passes and becomes part of the state Constitution, would it have the legal teeth to trump federal law?
Opponents of the measure believe federal law takes precedence, and approval would mainly serve to clutter the state Constitution with the equivalent of a political statement against “Obamacare.”
“We cannot undo with the Colorado Constitution what has been done in federal law,” said Alec Harris, policy analyst with the Colorado Center on Law and Policy. “If people think they’re voting to overturn federal health reform, that’s not the case.”
The Blue Book, produced by the Legislative Council, backs up the claim, saying the amendment wouldn’t “impact the federal government’s ability to enforce coverage requirements created by federal health care laws.”
“The state doesn’t have a speaking part as to the mandate,” agrees Scott Moss, a law professor at the University of Colorado who has expertise in constitutional law. “You might as well complain to the U.N. or your school board.”
Harris and Edie Sonn, spokeswoman for the Colorado Medical Society, also believe Amendment 63’s language is so broad and ambiguous that it will lead to lawsuits and could have unintended consequences that include shutting down student health services at public college campuses, and prohibiting the state from automatically enrolling people in Medicaid.
Caldara has acknowledged that Amendment 63 might not stop the federal mandate, but its passage could reinforce a lawsuit filed by attorneys general from nearly two dozen states challenging the constitutionality of health care reform. If the mandate is ruled as unconstitutional, he said, “the federal government will do what the federal government always does: put pressure on the states, withhold money, and make the states do their bidding as their servants. Should this amendment become constitutional law, then the state of Colorado can’t do the federal government’s bidding.”
Opponents of the amendment worry that if the attorneys general’s lawsuit is successful, 63 would then hamper any state efforts to require health insurance. There’s been support for the concept before: In 2008, a bipartisan state blue-ribbon commission recommended that every Coloradan have health insurance, and the Colorado Medical Society has backed something similar.
“We didn’t poll our members on Amendment 63, because we have a longstanding policy that everyone should have insurance,” Sonn said.
