Well here we go: as Congress goes to its month-long August recess, we have a full slate of primaries and other developments in the midterm election races to keep us engaged in politics. This Tuesday, the August primaries began in earnest with three states choosing their general election matches. Now, I could just give you another long and detailed roundup of the results as I have for, well, just about every other primary this year, but Missouri gives us the first challenge to the health care law at the ballot box, so I thought I’d look at that instead. Not to mention the fact that I go to college in Missouri, meaning I care about the results of this contest a bit more than just political curiosity. Of course, because I know just how much you guys love to find out who won what, here’s what happened in Missouri, in a nutshell.
Missouri Primary Results: Pretty Much a Foregone Conclusion
Starting with the most foregone conclusion, the Democratic primary for the Senate seat being made availableby retiring Sen. Kit Bond (R-Missouri): as nearly everyone expected from the very beginning of the contest this spring, Missouri Secretary of State Robin Carnahan picked up the Democratic nomination with 84% of the vote. On the Republican side, Rep. Roy Blunt beat out a relatively crowded field of nine candidates including Tea Party pick state Sen. Chuck Purgason, with 71% of the vote. I love primaries; no matter how crowded the field is, there’s a significant chance that one person will end up running away with it. Certainly, there are extremely close races, but a fair number of them end up being landslides thanks to the power of an incumbent running.
In fact, Blunt vs. Carnahan has been such a foregone conclusion of this primary that none of the polls that Politico pulled in even asked about any other matchup going back to March. This will be an interesting race to watch going forward, as an establishment Republican squares off against a relatively popular state official over an open Senate seat, in one of the states that I like to think of as being one of the “new” swing states. The polls show Blunt leading in almost all of them, but certainly close enough for Carnahan to make a late surge for the win. Now that we’ve gotten through the main results, there was a certain ballot measure up for a vote in Missouri that represents the first electoral challenge to the new health care law. Proposition C, as the measure is called, is far from the only challenge to health care reform, and is not even the only electoral one, but being the first to be decided, it deserves a closer look.
What the GOP Doesn’t Want You to Know
Proposition C centers, like just about every other challenge to health care reform, on the insurance mandate. In short, the mandate requires everyone to have health insurance starting in the middle of this decade or face an increasingly-steeper penalty. The problem with that in the eyes of just about every Republican, is that they are being forced to buy a product. Which technically is true, but if it is truly such a big deal, why don’t we ever hear the same argument about having to buy car insurance? I’ve long felt that the two are essentially the same principle: you pay a monthly premium that is proportional to the cost of repair (because medical treatment, after all, is essentially repair for the body) in order to save money when you need it.
With auto insurance, most people probably won’t need to use its benefits that often, but health insurance is used with every doctor’s visit. Both save tons of money down the road compared to the cost without insurance, and the savings on one major event, be it lifesaving surgery and prescription medication or repairing your car after a huge accident, can pay for the accumulated costs of the premium. Not to mention insurance often comes with ancillary benefits such as roadside assistance or drug discounts, but hey, someone will find something to complain about.
Though the Republican Party is making a big deal about the passage of Proposition C, in reality it does not mean much of anything. Though it passed with 71% of the vote in the Missouri primary, that does not indicate the level of bipartisan support for the measure you might otherwise be led to believe. Remember when I said that Rep. Roy Blunt won the Republican primary with 71% of the vote over a crowded field? The Democrats’ primary had nowhere near the level of contention or number of candidates as the Republican one, and further, just about everyone assumed that Carnahan would win anyway. Simply put, the gap in enthusiasm for the primary on both sides was vastly different; Republicans were already coming out in force, and the energy on the Democratic side just wasn’t there. To put it even more clearly, more than twice as many Republicans cast a ballot in the primary than Democrats did for Robin Carnahan. With the turnout so heavily skewed toward the GOP (read: opponents of health care reform), it is no surprise that Proposition C managed to pass.
If anything, Prop C is only a symbolic victory for the right. Indeed, it appears that conservatives want to run roughshod over everyone else on this issue in particular, though granted they seem to like to do that on most issues these days, which is another post in itself. Just in case Prop C failed, Missouri is one of the states preparing a legal challenge to the law as well. Why both routes? Isn’t one enough? I mean, it’s not like it will even matter in the end; a little thing in the U.S. Constitution called the Commerce Clause, the basis of a mountain of legal precedent establishing Congress’ power to regulate interstate commerce, and used as the justification for enforcement of federal civil rights laws, among other things, means that the mandate is legal. Oh, and if that’s not enough for you, the Supremacy Clause clearly establishes federal law to automatically supercede any random state law. Plus, we settled this nullification question back in the 19th century, for God’s sake! Then again, these are the people who are crazy enough to want to try to repeal the 14th Amendment on the basis of it providing automatic citizenship to anyone born on American soil as a way to deter illegal immigration, after all…
The What You Should Know About Missouri’s Proposition C (And Others Like It) by The New Age of Politics, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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i disagree completely that health insurance is like car insurance. we are only required to purchase *liability insurance*, so that if we cause an accident we can pay for the damage done to the other driver. we are not required to cover our own damages at all. and the reason that full coverage insurance is not required is precisely why you're against prop c: because there's no reason to force people to cover their costs. there's no specific societal harm done by those that choose not to purchase insurance. why force us to realize what's economical? prop c may be a "right wing statement," but you can turn it the other way and say that the health insurance mandate was just a "left wing statement" as well, that the government is being very condescending in telling us what's best for us. i, too, think that people should buy health insurance, but if it does no harm to me, or anyone, if an individual does it, then what is the government protecting? certainly not our freedoms.
Health insurance = auto insurance…uh, not exactly. State law, not Federal, requires motorists owning/leasing automobiles to carry liability insurance. THE BANK requires you to purchase collision and comprehensive. If you total your old car, then you’re out of a ride because you didn’t carry more insurance. Go buy another, if you can afford it. After all you saved all that money by not buying excessive insurance coverage. In the case of health insurance, the Federal government has stepped into the shoes of the bank. Wait a minute; here’s a suggestion: Maybe the bank who holds your mortgage/note/lease/credit card should require you to buy health insurance! ‘Cause if you get sick and can’t pay the bank, that’s just as bad for the bank as a loss on your car. Yeah, the bank can foreclose on your house, but it would rather have the money and health insurance would be a way to guarantee that the money is there to pay them back. And maybe the bank could require you to cover all the members of your extended family, not just you, because whose gonna let mom suffer without any financial help from her kids? So the Feds v. the bank…you pick. And don’t kid yourself; we all pay for those who aren’t covered by health insurance now.