Wyden-Brown Won’t Give States the Flexibility They Need to Reform Health Care

Kathryn Nix / February 14, 2011

States have a lot to lose under Obamacare. Beyond representing a huge overreach of Congress’s constitutional authority, the new law includes several provisions that restrict states’ ability to reform their health care systems in ways that best serve residents’ specific needs.

Obamacare requires all states to extend eligibility for Medicaid to an additional 18 million citizens. This will have serious implications for state budgets, which are already stretched thin by the cost of the program.

The law also requires that states set up health insurance exchanges, for which the rules and regulations will be defined by the federal government. Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels writes that Washington “assumes that [states] will set up and operate its new insurance ‘exchanges’ for it, using our current welfare apparatuses to do the numbingly complex work of figuring out who is eligible for its subsidies, how much each person or family is eligible for, redetermining this eligibility regularly, and more. Then, we are supposed to oversee all the insurance plans in the exchanges for compliance with Washington’s dictates about terms and prices.” (more…)