States Lead Efforts To Overhaul Health Care, Columnist Writes

It is "an embarrassment how little the federal government has done on issues such as health care" and other "huge national problems," compared with the progress made by states, Roll Call Executive Editor Morton Kondracke writes in a column.

While "comprehensive reform [is] just a debating issue" at the federal level, states "are forging ahead," he writes, noting Massachusetts' health insurance law, as well as "less well-known" programs in Maine and Vermont that do not have insurance mandates but "offer coverage to everyone." He adds, "Beyond that, all the ideas being talked about at the national level," including small-business insurance pools, pay-for-performance, prevention and wellness initiatives, information technology and "other improvements," are "being experimented with in dozens of states from Oklahoma to Minnesota and Rhode Island to California." He also notes that while the federal government "can't guarantee coverage to all children," Illinois and Wisconsin "are in the process of doing so."

He writes that National Governors Association Executive Director Ray Scheppach "expects that states will continue to have to take the lead on major domestic issues no matter who is elected president in November." Kondracke concludes, "Ideally, the next Congress and the next president would examine what the states have done and help them do more," and "it might help if the next vice president was a governor who could show the way" (Kondracke, Roll Call, 6/26).