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Should states oppose ObamaCare’s insurance exchanges?

While the Heritage Foundation has spoken highly of Utah’s insurance exchange, John Graham of the Pacific Research Institute recommends that states instead defeat ObamaCare (HR 3590), the legislation that mandates them.  Some excerpts from his article:

Obamacare expects states to do much of the law’s dirty work, including establishing “exchanges” to limit the health-insurance choices of many of their residents. Some advocates of consumer-driven health care believe that states can outwit Obamacare by establishing exchanges that are market-friendly. If only it were so. States would do best by simply ignoring Obamacare’s insurance exchanges and dedicating themselves to the defeat of this law. …

Pre-Obamacare, exchanges were suggested as a way to get around the major government failure in American health care: Congress’s grant of monopoly control of our pre-tax health dollars to our employers.

The Utah Health Exchange allows spouses to aggregate defined contributions from different employers. …

This “premium aggregator” has never been tested … reports from only a few months ago describe the exchange as a disappointment. …

Official sources … estimate that about half a trillion federal dollars will flow into Obamacare exchanges between 2014 and 2019 …

This fire hose of subsidies explains why it is far more likely that Obamacare will corrupt Utah than that Utah will manage to redeem Obamacare. …

States establishing exchanges will also find that they are very expensive to operate. …

States establishing Obamacare exchanges are making a one-way, lose-lose bet. If Obamacare persists, exchanges will become bloated administrative nightmares. If Obamacare is defeated, states will have wasted time and energy that should have been directed towards that effort. Obamacare is President Obama’s problem. Don’t make it your state’s, too.

Read the whole article at National Review Online: Should States Establish Obamacare Insurance Exchanges?