Must-Read: Brainwrap: West Virginia Sues Federal Government for Trusting West Virginia
: West Virginia Sues Federal Government for Trusting West Virginia: “The President… announced the federal government would hold off on enforcing the statutory requirements…
…Accordingly, HHS sent a letter to the States announcing a ‘transitional policy,’ allowing health insurers with certain conditions3 to continue policies that would be outlawed under the statute for a period of a year (later extended for another three years). That left the States holding the bag. They had to decide whether to enforce or not to enforce the very conditions that the federal government determined to abandon for the transitional period. West Virginia initially decided to enforce, but after HHS extended the transitional period, West Virginia opted to decline to enforce the mandates…
: West Virginia Sues Federal Government for Trusting West Virginia: “As far as I can tell, WV Republicans were hoping that the blame for the initial cancellations…
…(from the POV of those whose plans were cancelled) would fall upon President Obama, and that the blame for extending the plans (from the POV of the insurance carriers who had been hoping to pick up some market share from the cancelled enrollees) would also fall upon President Obama. The problem is that Obama/HHS left it up to the states, which means that the fallout for both decisions–whether positive or negative–lay at the feet of the state, not the feds. This apparently led to some amount of embarrassment in the WV corridors of power, I take it. Put another way, West Virginia sued President Obama for trusting West Virginia to make the right decision about how to handle the situation.