First Year MS-STEP Student Published in the Star Tribune
Virgina Dale, first year MS-STEP, was published in the Star Tribune last week. It is a great read about healthcare mandates and an excellent use of policy analysis skills.
Title and opening teaser (follow this link for the full article):
"Making a mandate more palatable: Offer options. If a healthful lifestyle is as effective as high-tech medicine -- which it may be -- shouldn't that be on the health-plan menu?
Last month, as the U.S. Supreme Court held oral arguments over the so-called individual mandate in President Obama's federal health care reform law, the justices looked for a logical basis to determine whether and when Congress has a proper constitutional power to make people buy things.
Using a much-discussed metaphor, Justice Antonin Scalia sounded relieved when he felt that he could distinguish the law's mandate to buy health insurance from a hypothetical mandate to buy, say, broccoli.
But in fact that's just the problem with the individual mandate. It does not require the purchase of broccoli -- which might actually improve people's health. But it does require the purchase of many highly technical medical interventions that do nothing useful."
