Angle Proposed Mandates on Health Insurance
The Las Vegas Sun reports:
Republican Senate candidate Sharron Angle has for months campaigned proudly on a bill she claims to have sponsored as an assemblywoman that would have eliminated Nevada’s insurance coverage mandates. The requirements drive up the cost of health insurance for everyone, she says.
In a candidate debate, before a newspaper editorial board and on her website, Angle has touted the bill to repeal mandates.
“If you go to my website, you’ll see my record,” Angle said at a Republican primary debate. “I introduced three bills. One would have taken off all of the mandates on insurance. That’s one of the solutions. We have to have a senator who will go and introduce something like that that says we don’t have mandated coverages on insurance.”
Angle’s position casts her not merely as a conservative, but as one with a free-market alternative to the Democrats’ health care reform bill, which her opponent, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, played a key role in passing this year.
However, there is a wide disparity between Angle’s rhetoric and her record.
An exhaustive search of Angle’s record as a four-term state legislator turns up no legislation to repeal any of the 38 state mandates requiring insurers to cover such things as diabetes, pregnancy complications, severe mental illness, hospice care, colon cancer screenings and acupuncture.
Yet during her time in the Legislature, Angle proposed no fewer than five laws that would have expanded state insurance mandates, undermining her persona as an ideologically pure conservative who relentlessly pursues limited-government policies.
She co-sponsored a bill to require insurance companies to cover mammograms and another bill, which she later voted against, to cover osteoporosis treatment. She co-sponsored legislation that would have required an insurance company to continue covering the treatment of a patient if the company’s contract with the provider was canceled before the treatment was completed.
She was primary sponsor of legislation that would have required insurance companies to cover not only the adult children of policyholders, but their parents too if their incomes were below the federal poverty line.
Angle’s campaign largely ignored multiple requests for comment on her contradictory positions on insurance mandates. The campaign’s only response was to point the finger at Reid, who has used Angle’s erroneous claims in an attack ad.
“Reid’s campaign made a false ad, they have no evidence of the bill they reference,” spokesman Jarrod Agen said in an e-mail. “Obviously, they are lying again.”
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