The health reform battle may well be decided in the state houses. Two events lead me to that conclusion.
First, as Bob Laszewski observed this morning, President Obama threw his support behind “the Wyden-Brown bill that would give the states the opportunity, in 2014, to take their share of the almost $1 trillion the new health law collects and use it to craft an alternative health care plan to their liking.”
The implications of passage of Wyden Bennett are clear – governors and legislators with grave concerns about some/most/all aspects of the Accountable Care Act and implementation thereof are (almost completely free) to come up with their own solutions.
And the GOP is in a very strong position to do just that.
I sat in on a session at the National Association of Mutual Insurance Companies’ annual meeting yesterday that focused – in large part – on the dramatic, game-changing outcome of the last election. The speaker, Neil Alldredge of NAMIC, noted that the GOP added 700 seats in state legislatures, the first time since 1966 that a move this momentous had occurred. This effectively puts the GOP in charge of all branches of government in a third of the states – sixteen to be exact.
If the governors and legislators in those sixteen, or, for that matter, any of the fifty states think they’ve got better answers, passage of the Wyden Brown bill will give them the freedom to put their ideas to work.
It’s easy to be in opposition – especially when the issue is health care. There are big and knotty issues with the Accountable Care Act; lets all hope the various states come up with better answers to our crisis of cost and coverage.
It will be very, very interesting to watch the solutions developed by Republicans and Democrats and Independents in the states. So far, two states – Vermont and Oregon – have begun major efforts to develop their own alternatives. If Republicans have a better answer, one that solves the problem of access and cost, they’ve got a great opportunity to get it out there for public review.
And if their solution is better, they are going to win very, very big in 2012.
We’ll see.
Mar
4
Joe,
This entire transaction appears to allow the states to do something they have been able to do all along. But, now they have access to tax funding to do so without the political baggage of having taxed their own citizens…the feds did it for them. Did I miss something?
One nonpartisan solution is for more consumers to ask questions of their providers which could lead to reduced costs. This video has some interesting points: http://whatstherealcost.org/video.php?post=five-questions