Vermont Must Get Obamacare Waiver To Implement State-Level Universal Health Care Plan

This is ironic, isn’t it? The State of Vermont is exploring a universal health care system as a way to lower the state’s health care costs. Setting aside for a moment criticism of that policy, what’s ironic is that if the state wants to implement a policy like that it must be exempted from Obamacare:

With Vermont moving toward a single-payer health-care plan today, the single-payer advocacy groups whose voices went mostly unheard in the health care fight are launching a move to press the Department of Health and Human Services to grant the state key Medicare and Medicaid waivers.

Physicians for a National Health Program and the blog Firedoglake are launching a petition to Secretary Kathleen Sebelius that calls the Vermont plan “an important model for our nation.

“The people of Vermont, including the state’s doctors, nurses and other health professionals, have inspired the entire nation by their unflagging dedication to winning a publicly financed, comprehensive and equitable health care system based on the principle that health care is a human right,” said the physicians’ group’s president, Dr. Garrett Adams.

In a release to go out later today, Firedoglake’s Jane Hamsher notes that companies including McDonalds have received waivers from the Affordable Care Act to offer plans that fall below the act’s standard.

This is one of the principle follies of Obamacare. It crams this entire diverse country into one framework of health care policy and prevents local governments from implementing policies they feel will help their respective health care situations.

Our founders create a nation with sovereign states for exactly this purpose. So that each state could experiment with policies that best address the situations within those given states. The federal government was specifically denied the authority to make sweeping, national policy decisions (except in a few specific areas) for this reason.

It seems liberals are getting an education in the notion of federalism, though the supporters of the Vermont policy would like to see it implemented nationally.

As to Vermont specifically, I’d like to see how that state’s citizens like living under a health care regime where the amount of health care they can access, what what sorts of treatment they can access, are regulated by the state.

Better to always be able to buy all the health care you want, knowing you may not always be able to afford all you need, than to have the state deciding what you need and how much you can get.