ObamaCare's Tort Deform

As if the expanded Medicaid benefits mandated by ObamaCare were not going to be enough of a burden on the states (the Nevada Department of Health and Human Services projects that the Silver State may be forced to accept more than 150,000 new enrollees and the state predicts its costs may exceed $600 million from 2014 to 2019). Now it appears that the legislation changes Medicaid in a way that opens the floodgates to massive litigation against the states.

Here are the words that are music to the ears of ambulance-chasing attorneys from sea to shining sea: "or the care and services themselves, or both.''

As recently brought to light by the Daily Caller's Jon Ward, those words on the 466th page of the 2,704-page health reform monstrosity passed into law last month amount to a massive fiscal stimulus for some of the least needy, fattest cats in the country.

[...]

The requirement of the states in what they give Medicaid recipients apparently shifts from making payments to their doctors to ensuring the medical "care and services themselves." So in conditions of doctor shortages, states could be legally judged to have failed in their obligations if a Medicaid patient had been unable to get a doctor's visit in timely fashion.

As the Daily Caller quoted Louisiana health secretary Alan Levine in a memo to fellow state officials, "With the expanded definition, it leaves every state vulnerable to a new wave of lawsuits any time someone cannot access a service, even if that service is limited by virtue of the rates we pay."

I often wondered how the Democrats would scale this particular wall. Attorneys are the #1 constitutency for the party, by far. But, even as they crafted an ever-expanding role for government in health care, they couldn't allow the trial lawyers access to the federal treasury through litigation.

There would be such a mad dash to pockets that deep that the republic literally would not long survive it. So the perfect, if temporary, solution seems to be to push that liability to the states.