Missouri state representative Chris Molendorp filed a bill last session to set up a health insurance exchange.  HB 609 was passed unanimously by the House and by the Senate committee it was assigned to.  It was never brought to the floor of the Senate.  Why?  Sen. Jane Cunningham said it was because she actually read the bill and was shocked at what it contained.

In 2010, Sen. Cunningham sponsored the Health Care Freedom Act, a referendum that sought to protect Missourians from the now infamous ‘individual mandate.’ The Act was placed on the ballot in August 2010 as Proposition C; the first time any Americans got to vote on the measure and they passed it with 71% of the vote. (Full disclosure: I managed the campaign to pass Prop C.)

Cunningham read HB 609 to basically gut everything passed by the voters of Missouri in Prop C.  Specifically, it yielded authority to the Department of Health and Human Services in Washington, DC 46 different times.  Beverly Gossage provides a substantive case against insurance exchanges in The Missouri Record, and in it she draws attention to a statement by Micheal Cannon of the CATO Institute:

I am continually surprised by how many people around the country mistakenly believe the new law requires states to create an Exchange. The authors of the law knew full well that such a requirement would be unconstitutional. Instead, the law asks states to do the heavy lifting of creating these bureaucracies, offers them considerable sums of money, and as a fallback position allows the federal government to create an Exchange if a state declines to do so.

Appearing before the Senate Interim Committee on Health Insurance Exchanges, Director of the Missouri Department of Insurance, John Huff, testified several times that problems with the federal exchanges could be fixed if Missouri took the initiative (and the federal grant money) and just designed its own exchange.  Otherwise, he feared, Washington would just force us into a one-size-fits-all exchange.

Or not.

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Nobody outside the inner halls of Congress really knows what’s going on in the negotiations on health care “reform. Every now and then, someone emerges from the formerly smoke-filled rooms and throws another 2,000 or so page “bill” out into the public and then disappears to continue talks to carve up one-sixth of the nation’s economy.

But we do know some of the critical unforgiving numbers. And we have strong reason to suspect that radical changes to Medicare Part E (as in Medicare for Everybody) is the real endgame, whatever the interim steps are called: public option, cooperatives, or mandated Insurance Exchanges.

We have the unmentionable truth that Medicare is insolvent. And the common dogma that Medicare is efficient, popular, and impregnable. Is it a Hegelian thesis and antithesis? With the synthesis being to throw the whole rest of the system, which is also allegedly bankrupting the country, into Medicare?

Are our leaders stark, raving mad? Or diabolically clever?

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