One N.J. Legislator Stood Alone Against Trenton’s Costly Addiction Mandate

Asm. Jay Webber (R-Morris)

Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays instead of serving you if he sacrifices it to your opinion.”

Edmund Burke

Governor Chris Christie‘s ongoing mission to rehabilitate his political career by hugging drug addicts and running ads to raise awareness of something everyone is already painfully aware of reached another low on Wednesday when he signed a much-heralded opioid treatment mandate into law.

“Everyone in New Jersey is impacted by America’s growing drug addiction crisis, and so I am proud bipartisan legislative leaders expedited the passage of this life-saving healthcare reform that will serve as a national model,” the Governor said in a statement. “Lives will no longer be put at risk by layers of needless bureaucracy or due to an overabundance of prescribed opioid pills that get into the hands of children and the vulnerable. This is no doubt the strongest law in the country that will provide critical prevention and treatment measures to combat the rampant, deadly disease of addiction.”

Asm. Jay Webber (R-Morris)

Insurance coverage for substance abuse treatment is now required under this new law whenever you purchase a policy here in the Garden State. This is Obamacare logic, folks. And you’re going to pay for it.

We continue to like ‘Christie Christie 2009’ better than Chris Christie 2017, Save Jerseyans.

The guy who was/pretended to be a common sense fiscal conservative laboring on the side of the little guy.

It’s all a matter of public record.

As I reminded you back in January when this bill was being pushed/discussed in the halls of power, Christie 1.0 ran against new health care mandates in 2009 when he dethroned Jon Corzine. That version of the Mendham Mauler would’ve pointed out that making New Jersey health care LESS affordable would be an objectively shitty way to combat a drug epidemic that’s disproportionately impacting economically-depressed communities.

Now he’s increased New Jersey’s health insurance mandates from 45 to 46 (e.g. young, healthy N.J. men are forced to pay for mammograms as part of their basic coverage premium), one of the main reasons why health insurance in this state is prohibitively expensive, a situation exacerbated by the prohibition on shopping for insurance across state lines. When young, healthy folks can’t afford a health care plan because it mandates mammograms (for men) or prostate examinations for women (good luck figuring that one out), the impact on the health insurance marketplace is predictably brutal.

Again… it’s simple mathematics. The cruel arithmetic that puts far too many of our citizens in a position of vulnerability in the first place. They’re trying to “save” people by making their lives more difficult and less affordable.

Rules of Mathematics notwithstanding, only ONE New Jersey legislator out of 120 had the intestinal fortitude to buck the pack and vote “no.”

Appropriately (and I hope you can detect a hint of extreme annoyance when I say this), it’s the same guy who 2009 Christie put in charge of the NJGOP only to push him out when national ambitions began to supplant New Jersey responsibilities.

“The sponsors have no idea how much the bill is going to cost taxpayers and they have no idea how much the insurance mandate will increase the cost of health insurance in the state,” explained my friend Assemblyman Jay Webber (R-Morris) in an interview with NorthJersey.com. “A mandate like this will increase premiums and so we’re going to have fewer people with health insurance at all.”

They also have no scientific basis for the extremely arbitrary 5-day cap on painkiller prescriptions.

Thanks, Jay, but without another 60 like you, we’re fighting a losing battle.

Trenton’s REAL plan to limit the number of addicts appears to be forcing as many of their cash-strapped, tax-battered, regulation-strangled families as possible to move somewhere else.

Of course that’s no plan at all. Not for the people they’re pretending so hard to care about.

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Matt Rooney
About Matt Rooney 8405 Articles
MATT ROONEY is SaveJersey.com's founder and editor-in-chief, a practicing New Jersey attorney, and the host of 'The Matt Rooney Show' on 1210 WPHT every Sunday evening from 7-10PM EST.