Obama’s health care reform: States may now choose to opt out

By Dr. Ananya Mandal, MDFeb 28 2011

President Obama yesterday [Monday] has allowed states to choose to opt out of his big health-care reform overhaul and design their own health systems, as long as they meet the overall goals of the national plan. However critics feel, this was bound to happen anyway.

Last year’s health-care reform law already allows states to propose their own frameworks for care, beginning in 2017. Obama, in a speech to the National Governors Association, said that he would support changing the law to allow that to happen three years earlier, in 2014. Obama spoke on a bipartisan bill in the Senate that would make this change saying, “I think that’s a reasonable proposal. I support it… It will give you flexibility more quickly, while still guaranteeing the American people reform.”

In a White House Blog this Monday, Kathleen Sebelius, secretary of Health and Human Services writes, a state could decide that it would rather link tax credits for small businesses with tax credits for lower-income individuals in an attempt to cover as many people as would the health reforms designed by Washington. She wrote, “State reforms could take many forms.”

However Obama’s move on Monday may be to further confuse a US public already thoroughly flummoxed by the state of America’s health-care reform debate. According to a recent Kaiser Family Foundation poll, 22 percent of US voters believe Obama’s health-care law has already been repealed by newly empowered Republican lawmakers. Another 26 percent aren’t sure whether the law has been repealed. In reality The House voted to repeal it, but the Senate did not. Obama would veto that anyway. A slim majority of respondents – 52 percent – said correctly that the federal health reforms remain the law of the land.

“I am not open to refighting the battles of the last two years or undoing the progress that we’ve made,” Obama told the governors when reporters were in the room. “But I am willing to work with anyone, anybody in this room, Democrat or Republican ... to make this law even better.”