President Barack Obama claimed last week that he wants to give states more flexibility to chart their own health care reforms. He said he would free them in 2014 from some of ObamaCare’s harsh requirements, rather than make them wait until 2017 to try their own approaches. But first they would have to prove they can get the same medical coverage levels and otherwise match the results that the socialized medicine program supposedly will achieve.
Unfortunately, this “change of heart” is a cynical gesture. That’s because the Obama administration will still ultimately get to rule on whether the states’ plans are satisfactory. So they will gain no real freedom from federal dictation of medical care.
Former Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt rightly dismissed this latest proposal. He told The Washington Post that the president’s message to the states was, “‘We’ll give you permission to ask for permission sooner rather than later.’ What Republicans are saying is that we don’t want to have to ask for permission at all, because we can’t afford to build the system that [the president] laid out for us.”
Most of the states have joined lawsuits seeking to have ObamaCare overturned as unconstitutional, which it plainly is. Regrettably, the president’s latest gesture to the states gives them no reason to back down from their effort to have ObamaCare overturned.