[This column was just published on the website of the Milbank Quarterly.]
A consistent theme in 2017 Republican Congressional efforts to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was the intent to empower the 50 states to use federal funds to reengineer their Medicaid and individual health insurance markets as they see fit. If yet another Republican attempt at ACA repeal and replace happens in 2018, the most likely vehicle will be a reformulated Graham-Cassidy bill, the final 2017 repeal effort in the US Senate that featured far-reaching devolution to states. The idealization of states as the best makers of health policy is a myth worth busting.
States, goes the thinking, are closer to the people than those who govern from Washington, DC, more attuned to real-world preferences and values than feds. States are nimbler, better at adjusting and innovating than the plodding feds. States are, in the high-minded and oft-repeated words of late Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, “the laboratories of democracy.”
As Republican Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA) wrote in the Washington Post this past July, “Returning the decision-making power to the states is not a Republican plan or a Democratic plan, but an American plan that reflects the faith in states held by our Founding Fathers.”1
As someone who has labored for decades in the vineyards of state health policy, I reply, nonsense. I give states their due. Massachusetts, for example, provided the inspiration for both the 1997 Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) and the 2010 private health insurance reforms in title 1 of the ACA. Democratic and Republican leaders there and in many other states have forged successful bipartisan approaches to some of America’s thorniest health challenges. Yet the notion that states have innate wisdom and a tighter finger on the pulse of the people always superior to the federal government is not true. One example will do. Continue reading “Mad About States”
Health Stew 