Station: 850 KOA
Show: Rosen
Guest: Suthers
Link: http://www.850koa.com/pages/mikerosen.html
Date: 2/01/2011
Topics: Obamacare
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00:12:38

SUTHERS:[Democrats] know because of Medicare and Medicaid, that a single payer would probably be held constitutional.

00:28:55

SUTHERS: The states aren’t burdened by enumerated powers. The state can exercise any power that the citizens don’t deprive them of in the Constitution. So unless you put a provision in the state constitution saying the state couldn’t force you to buy auto insurance or health insurance…that was one that we just voted on that in November, that’s what that was all about. Then the state can force you to do that.

00:29:47

SUTHERS: In fact, a lot of people thought how the federal government was going to try and get you to buy insurance was to incentivize the state to order you. They said look if you want your Medicaid dollars, which we pay roughly 90 percent, you the state have to order people to buy insurance. Untimely I think the leadership in Congress and the President thought that was too politically messy. The fight would move to all the state legislatures. States were passing laws saying you can’t order us to do that. And it would drag well into 2012 and mess up any reelection hopes and that sort of thing.

ROSEN: That’s just what the feds did when they pressured the states to raise the drinking age to 21. Any Wyoming was the last holdout. They threatened to cut off highway funds if the states didn’t raise the drinking age to 21…

SUTHERS: What they do is they put the state in a position of economically it’s not viable not to force you to do something. They didn’t take that route here.

CALLER: And how would you comment on the constitutionality of that? If the federal government was to force the states to do that?

SUTHERS: It’s been upheld many, many times…

CALLER: Out of political expediency then, Mr. Suthers, you don’t think that they did that?

SUTHERS: Yea I think that they thought it just be too messy and some states would ultimately have said I’m sorry, we are not going to do it. And it would have just been a political nightmare for them so they took this easy but unfortunately unconstitutional way of doing it.