Cato‘s Michael Cannon writes:

[T]he president announced last week he is willing to give states more flexibility to implement [ObamaCare, HR 3590]. …

If you think that means the president was himself exhibiting flexibility, you would be wrong.  Despite the rhetoric about compromise, what the president actually did was offer states the option of replacing his law with a single-payer health care system three years earlier than his law allows. …

Any waiver process that amends federal laws on a state-by-state basis … will inherently favor big-government proposals over free-market reforms. … Since a free market caters to consumers’ preferences, which may deviate from the government’s performance metrics, it would be far more difficult to get free-market approaches approved or renewed.

Constitutional constraints would also block free-market reforms. Any effort to reduce health care costs using market forces would have to reform the federal tax exclusion for employer-sponsored insurance and the Medicare program’s method of subsidizing coverage. Altering the payroll-tax treatment of health insurance in some states but not others would run afoul of Article I, Section 8: …

HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has written that ObamaCare gives states “incredible freedom” to implement the law. We now know what she meant: states are free to coerce their residents even more than ObamaCare requires. What’s incredible is that she calls that freedom.

Read the whole article: So This Is Freedom? They Must Be Joking. – Kaiser Health News.