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Life Health > Health Insurance > Your Practice

OK's Doak Wants to Challenge FIO Constitutionality, Pass Religious Liberties in Healthcare Resolution

By Elizabeth D. Festa

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Even as NAIC President Kevin McCarty highlighted the important relationship of the NAIC with the Federal Insurance Office while here at he NAIC Spring National meeting in New Orleans, and coordinating with the office is a 2012 Executive Committee charge, Oklahoma Insurance Commissioner John Doak is asking the state attorney generals to review the constitutionality of the U.S. Treasury office.

He is also urging other state attorney generals to review and consider filing lawsuits on behalf of state’s rights.

Doak said here he believes that the office will “be duplicative and circumvent state based regulation,” and that the guidelines outlined for the FIO in the Dodd-Frank Act will “naturally evolve” to federal regulation.

Doak said that both the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and FIO are “prime examples of the federal government’s growing intrusion into our lives that must be opposed.”

The FIO has yet to release its report to Congress.

Commenters said Doak’s initiative would be a challenge. States have challenged health care reform measures, though, of course.

Doak has also drafted a resolution that the NAIC not support any legislative action that would deny citizens constitutionally protected religious rights in healthcare, a nod toward the contraception  insurance coverage debate in Congress and in the presidential election now sparked by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services rule. 

He plans to introduce it at the NAIC plenary, sources say, but it is unlikely that the NAIC will be entering this debate at this point. 

Doak had expressed his strong disapproval of the US Senate voting 51 – 49 to kill the Blunt Amendment which would have allowedrights religious organizations to deny soem health isnruance coverage on the basis of conscience.

The Blunt Amendment, authored by Roy Blunt, R-Mo., was designed to combat the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) mandate which requires all health insurers to cover birth control for employees, even when the organization is religiously affiliated and opposed to birth control.

“ObamaCare is all about telling everyone what they have to do – from patient, to employer, to provider, and now its crossing over and infringing on our religious liberties,” Doak said.

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