As the National Governors Association gets ready to celebrate its 100th anniversary, the states are once again stepping up to serious problems the partisanship-possessed federal government can’t or won’t face.
Whether it’s health care reform, climate change, alternative energy or competitiveness, dozens of states are doing things Congress and the Bush administration sometimes can barely agree to even talk about.
It’s an old tradition, of course. In the Progressive Era, when the NGA was founded in 1908, states changed labor conditions and tried to control monopolies and securities fraud long before Washington got around to reform.
More recently, it was the Northeastern states that started the movement to control acid rain and other air pollutants. It was governors like Wisconsin’s Tommy Thompson and Michigan’s John Engler who pioneered welfare reform. And Tennessee’s (now-Sen.) Lamar Alexander and Arkansas’s Bill Clinton promoted education standards.
Part of the NGA’s meeting in Philadelphia July 11 to 14 will be devoted to commemorating the states’ achievements since President Theodore Roosevelt met with 39 governors at the White House in May 1908.
But the main business of this NGA meeting will be new challenges — clean energy alternatives, financial market disorder, early childhood education, reintegrating soldiers returning from war — that Congress and the White House have barely begun to deal with.
In fact, it’s an embarrassment how little the federal government has done on such issues as health care reform, clean energy and competitiveness — huge national problems — compared to state initiatives.
On the health care front, the federal government is stymied by partisanship.
Not only is comprehensive reform just a debating issue, but last year Bush vetoed a measure to expand children’s insurance coverage. This year, Democrats won’t accept his tacit admission that he was too chintzy and reach a compromise.
Meanwhile, states are forging ahead. It’s well known that Massachusetts, under former Republican Gov. Mitt Romney and a Democratic legislature, passed a mandatory insurance law. It’s less well known that Maine and Vermont also have programs, without mandates, to offer coverage to everyone.
Beyond that, all the ideas being talked about at the national level — small-business insurance pools, premium assistance programs, pay-for-performance, “connectors” to pool individuals, prevention and wellness, chronic disease management information technology and other quality improvements — are being experimented with in dozens of states from Oklahoma to Minnesota and Rhode Island to California.
