After well over a year of heated and divisive debate on President Obama “Affordable Care Act,” the President has decided to let individual states formulate their own solution to the health care crisis. Why this wasn’t offered up before all the money and venom that was exhausted for the first two years of his administration is rather curious. Is this some twelfth-hour conversion, influence from new staff members or a re-election ploy? Time will tell.
The President’s proposal came with certain caveats, some, which in themselves, are red herrings. The first being that any plan must achieve what he claims his plan accomplishes. That, in itself, is debatable.
Addressing a meeting of governors, Obama stated, “If your state can create a plan that can cover as many people as affordably and comprehensively as the Affordable Care Act does, without increasing the deficit, you can implement that plan and we’ll work with you to do it.”
What sounds as like some grand gesture by the chief executive is a bit disingenuous given that the law already allows individual states to propose their own plans, but not until 2017. The President’s offer now is to allow states to submit their ideas three years earlier, in 2014.
The big question is who will decide whether a state’s proposal meets President Obama’s goals? Will it be Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius? Will it be some bureaucrat or new czar? Why must any federal official have input into a realm that has resided within the states for as long as we’ve had health insurance?
There’s a view that many share, myself included, that dealing with health care costs best belongs with the people and not the government. Our government has never shown they are particularly effective at saving money or even managing our money. Free markets have a proven history of balancing costs against market forces, something the federal and even state governments have not done. Would not an organization of health care providers, insurance companies and every day citizens, be better suited to design a system that works at a price that’s affordable and doesn’t sacrifice quality? Or should we leave it to the people that brought us $1,200 toilet seats?
[widgets_on_pages id=”Underpost”]