We often complain about problems, with little ability to do anything about them.   This is particularly true in the area of politics, which while always local, is increasingly controlled by psychopaths, many of them not even persons, except in a convoluted legal sense, thousands of miles away.  I don’t want to get started on this issue of local sovereignty, because I have a large fish to try to figure out how to fry (proposing needed legislation for the publicity hungry AG to propose), but just a toe-dip into it before I begin.    

When the slave states seceded from the Union in the months before Lincoln was inaugurated, their issue was “states rights”.   In many areas; criminal law, family law, business law, each state is its own sovereign, by the design of our republican government.   Under our law community standards govern many things, like what is or isn’t pornographic. [1]   This is why the federal government had to step in after the Civil War to ensure community standards weren’t imposed on people who had been slaves a year or two earlier.

The “states rights” argument has most often been used by right wing types to claim exemption from federal meddling.   “We know best how to handle our own damn Negroes and don’t need you meddling liberal troublemakers coming down here telling us how to treat them,” as indignant southern states rights advocates said for decades, while standing on the same principle to prevent debate on federal anti-lynching laws.   

Of course, now that we are living in an open corporatocracy, certain universal rules are required for maximum profit.   The doctrine here is called “federal pre-emption”– on certain extremely important issues where a uniform national law is necessary, federal law preempts the wishes of the state and locality.  

Organic farmers in local communities, for example, had better shut up about pesticides and pesticide-resistant genetically modified crops, because the Supreme Court is about to sign off on Monsanto/Bayers’ right to sell their products everywhere with no interference from local bigmouths.  Same goes for marijuana, your local preference for a moderately harmless drug of choice has nothing to do with Nixon’s 1969 federal classification of the drug as a dangerous narcotic with no medicinal uses in his infamous Controlled Substances Act (“CSA”).  The CSA allows federal prosecution of pot smokers and the arguably arbitrary imprisonment of countless Americans in a decades’ long war against “Drugs”.   Same goes for anything we say it goes for, ass wipe.

One right-wing, states’ rights objection to the conservative private industry-protecting Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is that the federal law mandates the purchase of health insurance by millions of newly eligible citizens.   Takes away the right of the local government to decide how best to protect its disposable class of asshole citizens too stupid to have corporate jobs, or public sector ones, that provide health care.  

But enough of the critique of the easy to ridicule right-wing, I’m here to propose legislation to fix a specific problem: 

that NYS insurance companies routinely deny healthcare services to mandated low-income health insurance buyers utterly unprotected by New York State law, in spite of the fig leaf of administrative supervision by the Department of Financial Services.

Just before New York State adopted the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (“PPACA”) it abolished the New York State Insurance Department and removed all traces of oversight from the New York State Department of Health.  The functions of these agencies were merged into the New York State Department of Financial Services.  This agency has sole responsibility in New York State for oversight of health insurance companies, as well as all fraud investigations related to consumer fraud against insurance companies, and all complaints about the practices of financial institutions, banks and brokers.  

Everything but, according to a fraud investigator for the Department of Financial Services, who referred me to a non-responsive phone tree number, investigations into colorable fraud committed by insurance companies against mandated health-care “consumers” in New York State.

Granted, the PPACA was written by health industry insider Liz Fowler.  It is only sensible that it tilts toward protecting industry profits over the rights of individual patients.   In light of this, it is a grave oversight, and a direct threat to the health of its most vulnerable citizens, that New York State does not have an independent agency dedicated to resolving the countless daily denials of purchased health care services. The need for this agency is particularly acute now that we have a president determined to eliminate most government regulation of private industry.

A health insurance consumer in New York State looks in vain for a forum where these complaints can be adjudicated.   At minimum a well-staffed Ombudsperson’s office should be created– and the 800 number prominently displayed on the New York State of Health Marketplace homepage.  Consumers of mandated health insurance in New York State should not be subjected to the arbitrary abuse of power by unaccountable private corporations whose primary business is increasing their profit margins.  

Proposal: create an agency dedicated solely to enforcing the rights of defrauded health insurance consumers in New York State.  

I mean, seriously, dude, how hard would that be, in the looming age of Trumpcare?

[1]  The Supreme Court recognizes that what is titilatingly pornographic to a hipster from Brooklyn might actually induce vomiting in someone from Kenosha, Wisconsin.