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Tuesday, July 5, 2011
Health care amendment backers to submit more than 500,000 signatures
COLUMBUS: For the past 15 months, volunteers from Ohio Tea Party groups and their allies have been gathering signatures to put a constitutional amendment before voters aimed at exempting Ohioans from the personal mandate in the controversial federal health care law championed by President Barack Obama and Democrats.
Organizers plan to submit petitions to Secretary of State Jon Husted today with more than 530,000 signatures from registered voters to place the amendment on the Nov. 8 ballot.
That’s more than the required 385,245 valid signatures.
“This has been a long, hard grind,” said Jim Lewis of West Chester Twp. in Butler County, southwest Ohio regional coordinator for the Ohio Project, the grassroots effort behind the proposal.
The amendment targets the requirement in the federal health care law that all Americans buy 2014 buy health insurance or face financial penalties. It also would forbid the state government from imposing a similar requirement.
The requirement, said Lewis, is a “slippery slope” that could lead to the government telling people to “buy this kind of car” and “this kind of food.”
The Healthcare Freedom Amendment, backed by the Ohio Republican Party, could be one of two high-profile, politically polarizing issues on the Nov. 8 ballot.
Last week, supporters of a referendum aimed at repealing Senate Bill 5, legislation restricting public employee collective bargaining, submitted petitions with more than one million signatures to get that issue on the ballot. The requirement for a referendum is 231,147 signatures. Democrats and labor unions are major forces behind the repeal effort.
Husted has until July 26 to notify supporters of both proposals if they met the signature requirements. If not, they get 10 days to gather more signatures. There’s disagreement about the impact passage of the health care amendment would have.
Because a state law or state constitution can’t supersede a federal law, passage of the amendment would be mostly “symbolic,” said Richard Saphire, a professor at the University of Dayton’s law school.
Maurice Thompson, executive director of the 1851 Center for Constitutional Law and a backer of the amendment, disagreed. Passage of the amendment could aid in lawsuits already under way, including one in which Ohio is participating, challenging the federal health care law.
In the “worst-case scenario” in which the U.S. Supreme Court would uphold the federal law, the amendment still would prohibit the state and local governments from interfering with health care markets, Thompson said.
The political battle is already getting started.
Republican Gov. John Kasich “supports repealing Obamacare and replacing it with reforms that actually address the needs in health care. Namely, lowering costs by reducing frivolous lawsuits, improving care coordination, encouraging healthier lifestyles and allowing consumers to purchase health insurance across state lines,” Connie Wehrkamp, Kasich’s spokeswoman, said in an email.
However, Seth Bringman, spokesman for the Ohio Democratic Party, called the amendment “a political ploy and a waste of taxpayer dollars.”
“The very policy that the Tea Party is arguing against was a Republican idea championed by that party’s presidential frontrunner, Mitt Romney. Massachusetts enacted a state law similar to the federal health care law when Romney was governor.
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