Louisiana Senate Committee Rejects Health Care Exchange Bill

The Louisiana Senate Finance Committee voted recently to reject a state senate bill that would have set up a group of elected and appointed officials to create and oversee their state’s health insurance exchanges, a principal tenet of the affordable health care act championed by President Obama and his administration

State Senator Karen Carter Peterson (D-New Orleans) said she had not been pushing the bill as a partisan piece of legislation, but according to an article in the Times-Picayune, that didn’t matter with a panel dominated by Republicans.

The rejection of Peterson’s bill means that Louisiana will remain one of a few states which have refused to create their own exchanges, which are meant to launch in January 2014.

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, who has opposed the healthcare overhaul from the beginning, has decided that the federal government should be responsible for running the exchange.