Republican South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley wants to make very, very sure that her state does not participate in making health insurance readily and affordably available to its residents. As with all states, work began this year to determine how the state should best set up its exchange and prepare to implement the provisions of the Affordable Care Act.
But South Carolina's panel was hamstrung by having its conclusions dictated by Gov. Haley before meetings even began.
In a March 31 email thread that included Haley, her top advisers and the committee member who eventually wrote the report, Haley wrote, "The whole point of this commission should be to figure out how to opt out and how to avoid a federal takeover, NOT create a state exchange," which is eventually what happened. [...]
The emails were released to the newspaper Friday afternoon in response to a Nov. 16 public records request to the S.C. Department of Health and Human Services.[...]
"Oh my God, we just threw $1 million away here," said Frank Knapp, who participated in the meetings as president of the S.C. Small Business Chamber of Commerce. "This confirms this whole thing was an effort to justify the million-dollar grant, but the reality is they had no intention of even exploring whether the state should establish an exchange -- which is exactly what the grant called for."
The non-partisan committee took $1 million in a taxpayer-funded grant to determine either how to implement a state exchange under the federal law, or come up with viable policy alternatives, and did none of that, instead following Haley's dictate. Ironically, without another alternative in place, Haley has opened up South Carolina to more federal involvement in her state, because the law requires that the federal government steps in to create exchanges for states which fail to do it.
Haley's allergy to the Affordable Care Act is so severe that she apparently made it a key factor in her presidential endorsement of Mitt Romney, extracting from him a promise that he would grant her state a waiver to opt out of the ACA, if he becomes president.
Of course, it's all so much theater, since waivers won't even be a possibility until 2017. In order for the state to get a waiver, it would have to prove that it was providing the same protections and benefits to its residents as the ACA would, something Haley doesn't seem particularly interested in doing, however happy she might be to take federal grant money.