A CONCURRENT RESOLUTION, Opposing the government takeover of health care as currently proposed by Congress and encouraging preservation of states' rights regarding health care regulation.

    WHEREAS, the federal government seeks to impose unfunded mandates on states to expand medicaid in excess of twenty-six billion dollars in the Senate-passed health care bill and thirty-four billion dollars in the House-passed version; and

    WHEREAS, both pieces of legislation would increase the number of individuals covered under medicaid by forty percent. Consequently, the medicaid program would no longer be a safety net program; and

    WHEREAS, in South Dakota, the Senate-passed bill would cost the State of South Dakota fifty-three million seven hundred thousand dollars between 2010 and 2019, and the House-passed bill would cost the State of South Dakota one hundred thirty-four million one hundred thousand dollars between 2013 and 2019; and

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    WHEREAS, this bill also cuts approximately four hundred seventy billion dollars from medicare to create a new federal long-term care health entitlement program at a time when medicare has thirty-eight trillion dollars in unfunded liabilities and will be insolvent by 2017; and

    WHEREAS, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that under the Senate-passed bill, health insurance premiums for South Dakotans and all Americans will not decrease but will continue to increase at double the rate of inflation or more; and

    WHEREAS, despite higher taxes, cuts to medicare, and increased federal health care spending, the Senate-passed legislation leaves twenty-three million Americans uninsured and the House-passed legislation leaves eighteen million Americans uninsured; and

    WHEREAS, the Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution states that, "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people."; and

    WHEREAS, the states primarily regulate today's health insurance market and provide aggressive oversight of all aspects of this market and enforce consumer protection as well as ensure a local, responsive presence for consumers:

    NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, by the Senate of the Eighty-fifth Legislature of the State of South Dakota, the House of Representatives concurring therein, that the South Dakota Legislature is opposed to the health care reform proposal passed in the United States Senate and the United States House of Representatives, and strongly urges Congress not to adopt either measure or institute new federal review, oversight, or preemption of state health insurance laws.