Anxious to avoid raising taxes too much to pay for their health care proposals, the Obama Administration and its Congressional allies hit on a great new idea: Make the states raise their taxes to fund the program instead.
Both the House and the Senate bills require that states cover a larger percentage of their people under Medicaid – a joint state and federally funded program. The idea was to force the state to raise their taxes to cover a big part of the health care bill for treating poor people. Since the Feds can simply charge any increase in spending to their already overdrawn bank account, but the states have to balance their budgets, the increased state spending for Medicaid will cause sharp increases in state taxes. And the Governors will get the blame, not Obama and not the Congress.
