Whether the Bill McCollum-led federal lawsuit over health care reform is successful or not is likely moot.
Indeed, the legal consensus is that the Pensacola-filed suit, which says the Constitution hardly authorizes the U.S. to mandate that “all citizens and legal residents have qualifying health care coverage,” will probably not prove a winner. Overcoming a couple of Constitutional clauses — namely supremacy and commerce — is likely too daunting. But more to the pragmatic political point, Florida’s Republican attorney general will have won if he can convert the suit to political momentum and ride the tide of anti-health care reform partisanship to gubernatorial victory in November.
Early returns indicate McCollum, who has received plenty of national face time for his “living tax” penalty contention, is already benefiting in the short term. His gubernatorial lead over the lesser-known Alex Sink, the state’s Chief Financial Officer, has now widened in the aftermath of the high-profile lawsuit with 12 other attorneys general. The recent Mason-Dixon Polling & Research survey showed that a majority (51 percent) of registered Florida voters approved of McCollum’s lawsuit, and 39 percent opposed it.
Strategically, that’s one way to diffuse a charisma-challenged, status quo-venerating “career politician” label. Toss some energizing, legal red meat at the GOP base, the Tea Partiers and disaffected independents and Democrats, and enough voters could forget about all those Howdy Doody look-alike references.
But the lawsuit gambit is only as effective as the campaign dynamics it’s intended to stoke. Political tides rush as well as recede. Anyone can take a snapshot, especially during these partisan, protean times.
For example, health care reform might be perceived differently by the public in the fall. Keep in mind that by election day, a number of health care reform benefits will already be in effect. Among them: providing immediate access to high-risk pools for those with no insurance due to pre-existing conditions; barring insurers from denying people coverage when they get sick; barring insurers from denying coverage to children with pre-existing conditions; barring insurers from imposing lifetime caps on coverage; requiring insurers to permit children to stay on their parents’ policies until they turn 26; and reducing the “doughnut hole” in Medicare drug coverage.
Repeal would then mean undoing what a number of voters just might want to keep. And the mandate for most people to obtain coverage or face penalties doesn’t kick in until 2014.
There’s also the Obama variable. Even his staunchest critics concede the president, even if he is the socialist from hell, is formidable when he’s on his game and in campaign mode.
But if McCollum truly wanted to max out on chances of his lawsuit’s passage, he would do this: He would add an “individual waiver” to cancel out the “individual mandate.” Moreover, it couldn’t help but energize the individual-liberties-on-steroids set.
Something like: “I’m young, healthy and pretty much invulnerable, if not immortal. But if, by some unimaginably implausible happenstance, I should find myself in dire need of medical assistance and immediate transport to an emergency room, it’s permissible to leave me unattended. It wouldn’t be fair to charge taxpayers, given that I’ve formally opted out of helping others. That’s my individual right, and I’ll die for it, if necessary.”