Can State Governments Set Up Universal Health Care on Their Own?

By Ezra Klein, Washington Monthly
Posted on August 8, 2007, Printed on August 9, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/59047/

It is one of the happy incidents of the federal system," Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once mused, "that a single courageous state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country." Well, quite. These days we practically expect the states to try their hand at fixing tricky national problems before the federal government steps in. So to many observers, when several states recently turned their attention to providing health care for the uninsured -- one of the thorniest domestic problems of all -- it looked like cause for considerable optimism.