Kate Bolduan<\/a>, a very respected journalist on CNN, seemed to fall into a Republican trap on how to frame health care policy. She was interviewing<\/a> Senators Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Bill Cassidy (R-LA) about their new proposed Republican health care plan, one which would send money from Washington to state capitols where legislators and governors could presumably decide what to do with their new resources.<\/p>\n The problem was with the inadvertent way in which Bolduan referenced the plan as she interviewed the two senators.<\/p>\n Her opening query was to Senator Graham. She asked, \u201cSenator Graham, in a nutshell, you\u2019re taking Obamacare money and giving it back to the states.<\/p>\n The linguistic problem is with one word, \u201cback.\u201d How could the federal government give back<\/u> to the states something that the states never had? The money that the federal government has used to finance the Affordable Care Act have come from a number of sources, but none of them are the 50 states.<\/p>\n Individuals and even corporations have paid a number of taxes and fees to the federal government. But states rely entirely on whatever taxes, fees and subsidies that they receive.<\/p>\n It is true that states have been the recipients of largesse from the federal government. Medicaid is an excellent example of this. But it is difficult to find any case in which empowering the states with money has served the public better than when it is administered by the federal government in Washington, DC. The main reason why states receive federal dollars is because of pressure from \u201cstates\u2019 rights\u201d federal legislators (usually from the old Confederacy), who prefer to undermine measures that extend human rights, civil liberties and our social and economic safety nets.<\/p>\n