Christie Vetoes Health Insurance Exchange for New Jersey
In a swipe at President Obama’s signature health care legislation, Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey vetoed on Thursday an online marketplace that the Legislature created to help residents and small businesses buy health insurance.
The Affordable Care Act, the federal law passed in 2010, requires most Americans to have health insurance and mandates states to have health care benefits exchanges to help them buy it. With the Supreme Court debating whether the health care law is constitutional, Mr. Christie said in his veto message that the exchange, approved in March, was “premature” and could impose “unnecessary obligations upon the state’s citizens.”
“Indeed, the very constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act is cloaked in uncertainty, as both the individual mandate to procure health insurance as well as the jurisdictional mandate to establish an exchange may not survive scrutiny by the Supreme Court,” he wrote.
“Because it is not known whether the Affordable Care Act will remain, in whole or in part, it would be imprudent for New Jersey now to create an exchange before these critical threshold issues are decided with finality by the court,” he added.
Mr. Christie was the second governor to veto such a law, following Gov. Susana Martinez of New Mexico, who is also a Republican. In New York, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, a Democrat, took the opposite tack last month: after the Legislature declined to create an exchange, he established one by executive order.