Making a Bad Bill Worse
Kathryn Nix /
The Washington Post’s EJ Dionne’s had an op-ed yesterday detailing six policy areas where House Democrats believes they can pull the Senate health care bill further to the left. For every issue that Dionne identifies, a House victory would lead America even further down the path to government run medicine:
1. A National Health Insurance Exchange
A national exchange would create a vehicle for federal regulation of insurance policies and one-size-fits-all health plans that don’t necessarily meet the needs of all Americans. This threatens the federalist division of power between the national government and the states, and undermines the capacity of the states to function in this vital area of public policy. A national exchange would also pre-empt the states in pursuing their own efforts to expand coverage, or, for those states that would like to experiment with an exchange, it would encroach on the states’ abilities to tailor their state-based exchanges to their specific needs. A health insurance exchange, unfortunately, can mean many different things, from a facilitator of consumer choice and open competition to a restriction on both. For those interested in the concept, states based insurance exchanges have to be done right. Simply having the states administer a federal exchange makes matters worse, by hampering or even killing off state innovation. (more…)