Evan Soltas on Medical Reform Federalism—in Canada →

In my post “Health Economics” I propose (in effect, if not in so many words) that in place of the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) states be allowed to experiment with different ways to provide universal access to medical care. On Twitter (as storified in “Miles Kimball and Noah Smith on Balancing the Budget in the Long Run”), I have sharpened that proposal to what can be translated out of Twitter shorthand to this:

Let’s abolish the tax exemption for employer-provided health insurance, with all of the money that would have been spent on this tax exemption going instead to block grants for each state to use for its own plan to provide universal access to medical care for its residents.

Evan Soltas argues here that a somewhat decentralized approach in this spirit has worked well in Canada, for at least a part of its medical spending.