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Mitch Daniels in the WSJ: "Unless you're in favor of a fully nationalized health-care system, the president's health-care reform law is a massive mistake.."

The Indiana Governor (and potential GOP presidential candidate) ponders what the states can do if the law is not repealed or judicially voided. The states cannot be commandeered to run the program, so there is leverage to bargain. These are the conditions that 21 governors have proposed to the Secretary of Health and Services:

? We are given the flexibility to decide which insurers are permitted to offer their products.

? All the law's expensive benefit mandates are waived, so that our citizens aren't forced to buy benefits they don't need and have a range of choice that includes more affordable plans.

? The law's provisions discriminating against consumer-driven plans, such as health savings accounts, are waived.

? We are given the freedom to move Medicaid beneficiaries into the exchange, or to utilize new approaches to the traditional program, instead of herding hundreds of thousands more people into today's broken Medicaid system.

? Our state is reimbursed the true, full cost of the administrative burden to be imposed upon us, based on the estimate of an auditor independent of HHS.

? A trustworthy projection is commissioned, by a research organization independent of the department, of how many people are likely to wind up in the exchange, given the large incentives for employers to save money by off-loading their workers.

Obviously, this is a very different system than the one the legislation intends....

That's a GOP proposal on how to tweak health care reform, which is what Obama and others have said they need. With the prospect of 21 states dropping out of the enforcement regime, there should be real pressure to work with them and try to draw them back in.

On the other hand, you really are in favor of a fully nationalized health-care system, then you might celebrate the states failure to go along with the attempt to include them. And if what happens is, as Daniels predicts, "first-rate operational catastrophe," then that sets up the collapse into the only workable fix a fully nationalized health-care system.

Full post as published by Althouse on February 07, 2011 (boomark / email).