I get my care through the VA, the closest thing America has to universal government health care, and I have waited four months for a referral that a private clinic would schedule in a week. The VA does good work and I am grateful, but it is also a preview of scale: a federal bureaucracy managing care for 330 million people. The states are already laboratories here: Massachusetts, Hawaii, and others have near-universal coverage through their own designs. Census. Let states keep experimenting instead of betting the entire country's health on one federal overhaul that cannot be undone if it fails. Washington struggles to run a website; I do not want it scheduling my surgery.
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