The so-called health care “reform” law known as Obamacare would be a financial disaster for the State of New Hampshire. Our legislators should block its implementation in every way they can. A majority of the House of Representatives gets this. Does the Senate?

The House already has passed House Bill 1297, which would prohibit the state from creating the type of health insurance “exchange” mandated by Obamacare. Backers of the law claim that those exchanges are merely open marketplaces in which insurers will compete for customers. They are deliberately misleading the people.

The exchanges are actually state-run closed markets. Bureaucrats would rigidly control the entry into these so-called marketplaces and have enhanced powers to regulate the insurers that are allowed to participate. They would function nothing like a free market, and more like a state-run insurance collective.

Not only would they reduce competition and raise prices, but they would cost the state a large sum to run. They take health insurance in exactly the opposite of the direction it needs to go.

A majority in the state House recognized this and passed HB 1297 to prevent the state from creating such a monstrosity. Last week, the Senate Commerce Committee incredibly voted to recommend sending the bill to interim study, effectively killing it for the year. The excuse was that the Supreme Court would decide the fate of Obamacare, so we don't have to act.

But we do. The Supreme Court might let the law stand or strike down only parts of it. Even if it overturns the entire law, the state needs to stand in defiance of this oppressive federal dictate. It needs to tell Washington that we have no intention of submitting quietly to its effort to control our people, our markets and our government via a thousand distant dictates.