Is a Health Care Compact among the States the answer to ObamaCare?

posted at 2:31 pm on June 6, 2011 by Bruce McQuain
[ Healthcare ]   

One of the ideas being given impetus by the birth of ObamaCare into full fledged law of the land is an idea of the states forming a health care compact. Compacts, of course, have been used throughout our history among states to manage their business without the federal government’s involvement.

In the case of health care a health care compact would:

1) Give the states the authority to decide how to spend their federal health care dollars.

2) Would empower the states to provide health care services, including Medicare and Medicaid, for their own citizens.

3)Place the decision making authority for health care policies at state level where the legislature would be free to tailor and pilot innovative programs that would simultaneously lower costs and improve health care.

As you read this, 14 states are considering it and Georgia and Oklahoma have both signed it into law.

The point, of course, is to have both accountability (states accountable to their citizens) and the ability to innovate (the “laboratories of freedom” that the states have always been envisioned to be) with, hopefully, programs that actually produce the desired “lower costs and better care”.

Of course there are problems to be considered as well as detractors of the idea. One of the primary problems is that Congress must give its consent before any such compact can come into being. There are those who think this is an impossibility. Of course, there were many who thought the passage of ObamaCare was an impossibility – but here we are.

The second line of attack is that this is not a Constitutional nor a free-market answer to the problem. Well the Constitutional and free-market answer to the problem is repeal or having the law struck down by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional.

But what if that doesn’t happen? It’s easy to make those arguments in dismissal of the health care compact, but assuming the law stands as it now does, what’s the alternative?

Wouldn’t you rather see something at state level where innovation in all sorts of different programs could be tried and shared instead of a top-down, one-size-fits-all monstrosity called ObamaCare? Certainly not the best of all worlds, but much better than the current nationalized plan.

If the money is going to be allocated because the law stands, wouldn’t you rather have it controlled and spent closer to home by politicians which are much more accountable to you than those in Washington DC?

The idea is certainly worth consideration.

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Bruce McQuain blogs at Questions and Observations (QandO), Blackfive, the Washington Examiner and the Green Room.  Follow him on Twitter: @McQandO

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