Obamacare's Achilles' Heel

"Insurance exchanges constitute the key to success or failure of the law," writes David Catron, adding "states have an opportunity to shoot a poison arrow directly into Obamacare's Achilles' heel."

• Obamacare can't work with insurance exchanges — i.e., new bureaucracies whose ostensible purpose will be to provide "marketplaces" in which people with no employer-based health insurance can shop for coverage at competitive rates.
• The law assumes states will create insurance exchanges, but it doesn't actually require them to do so.
• States have no rational incentive to create exchanges, since exchanges will cost states from $10 million to $100 million per year to operate.
• The Feds can set up an insurance exchange, but then it would bear the operational costs, which it can't afford. Worse, state-based exchanges may distribute credits and subsidies, but a federal exchange may not. That's a huge problem for Obamacare zealots.

There's one more twist in the law. Not creating an insurance exchange protects a state's businesses from job-killing penalties:

Catron: 43 Catholic Organizations Launch Legal Challenge

If the U.S. Dept of Health and Human Services "thought the outrage voiced by various cardinals, bishops, and countless lay Catholics over the anti-conscience mandate was mere bluster, they got a wake-up call yesterday," writes David Catron at the American Spectator.

On Monday, 43 high-profile Catholic organizations, including the Archdiocese of Washington, D.C. and the University of Notre Dame, filed suit against the Obama administration. In an open letter, the Archbishop of Washington summed up the collective position of the plaintiffs by explaining that the mandate "fundamentally redefines the nation's long-standing definition of religious ministry… HHS's conception of what constitutes the practice of religion is so narrow that even Mother Teresa would not have qualified."