Health care: The States’ Failed Experiments

Peter Suderman looks at how health care reforms similar to Obamacare have worked when tried in the individual states. The States’ Failed Experiments.

Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis famously envisioned the states serving as laboratories, trying “novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.” On health care, that’s just what they’ve done. Like participants in a national science fair, state governments have tested variants on most of the major health care reforms Congress is considering. The results include dramatically higher premiums in the individual market, spiraling public costs, and reduced access to care. In other words, the reforms have failed.
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Despite these state-level failures, President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats are pushing a slate of similar reforms. Unlike most high school science fair participants, they seem unaware that the point of doing experiments is to identify what actually works. Instead, they’ve identified what doesn’t—and decided to do it again.