While I certainly meant this to be a series, I never expected it to be a DAILY series....

Today's lesson comes to us from the great state of Florida where they have found a way to make health insurance affordable for the 3.8 million Floridians who do not have access to insurance.

But the Florida reform, which both houses of the legislature approved unanimously, renounces Mr. Obama's favored remedy: It nudges the government out of the health-care marketplace. Insurance companies will be permitted to sell stripped-down, no-frills policies exempted from the more than 50 mandates that Florida otherwise imposes, including for acupuncture and chiropractics. The new plans will be designed to cost as little as $150 a month, or less.

Emphasis mine. The Florida Legislature has figured out something that the Minnesota Legislature needs to figure out. Mandates make things cost more! It's really that simple!

Mr. Crist observed that state regulations increase the cost of health coverage, and thus rightly decided to do away with at least some of them. It's hard to believe, but this qualifies as a revelation in the policy world of health insurance. The new benefit packages will be introduced sometime next year and include minimum coverage for primary care and catastrophic expenses for major illness.

Of course, the defenders of government interference are not happy with this development.

Critics are already saying that, without mandates, the plan won't guarantee quality of care. That's purportedly why the states have imposed more than 1,900 specific-coverage obligations.

However, the WSJ writers give that objection the slashing it so richly deserves.

These government rules are imposed without regard for how much they will cost and who will bear the burden. In practice, the costs are disproportionately carried by lower- and middle-income workers, who already on average have more limited insurance coverage as part of their compensation, or none at all. When prices rise because of mandates, the less affluent are often forced to make an all-or-nothing choice between "Cadillac coverage," which involves just about everything, or going uninsured. In other words, they're prohibited from buying the lower-cost options that might be better suited to their needs.

A great example is from the Logical Household. No one in the Logical Household will EVER need treatment for Tay Sachs Disease or Sickle Cell Anemia. However, because of Minnesota state mandates, our insurance company is required to provide it to us! Now if we were to adopt a Jewish or African American child, that coverage would indeed be necessary, but as free people we should be ALLOWED to make that decision for ourselves! Not have the government decide it for us.

The people of Florida should be proud that their legislature took the biggest step to date in making insurance affordable to those who need it. Will the Minnesota Legislature be the next to make this bold decision? We can only hope!

It's no fun to kick a state when it's down – especially when the local politicians are doing a fine job of it – but the latest news of Michigan's deepening budget woe is a national warning of what happens when you raise taxes in a weak economy.

Her tax plan raised the state income tax rate to 4.35% from 3.9%, and increased the state's tax on gross business receipts by 22%. Ms. Granholm argued that these new taxes would raise some $1.3 billion in new revenue that could be "invested" in social spending and new businesses and lead to a Michigan renaissance.

Officials in Lansing reported this month that the state faces a revenue shortfall between $350 million and $550 million next budget year....Six months later (after the budget was enacted - ed) one-third of the expected revenues have vanished as the state's economy continues to struggle. Income tax collections are falling behind estimates, as are property tax receipts and those from the state's transaction tax on home sales.

Michigan is now in the 18th month of a state-wide recession, and the unemployment rate of 6.9% remains far above the national rate of 5%. Ms. Granholm blames the nationwide mortgage meltdown and higher energy prices for the job losses and disappearing revenues, but this Great Lakes state is in its own unique hole. Nearby Illinois (5.4% jobless rate) and even Ohio (5.6%) are doing better.

The tax hikes have done nothing but accelerate the departures of families and businesses. Michigan ranks fourth of the 50 states in declining home values, and these days about two families leave for every family that moves in. Making matters worse is that property taxes are continuing to rise by the rate of overall inflation, while home values fall. Michigan natives grumble that the only reason more people aren't blazing a path out of the state is they can't sell their homes. Research by former Comerica economist David Littmann finds that about the only industry still growing in Michigan is government. Ms. Granholm's $44.8 billion budget this year further fattened agency payrolls.

We are faced with some sobering realities:

* Between 1990 and 2007 Utah experienced a 47.5 percent increase in population growth.

* During that same period of time, travel on Utah roads, measured in vehicle miles traveled on our roads (VMT), increased 78.5 percent.

* During those same years the State added only 4.2 percent more capacity to the highway system to accommodate this explosion of growth.

So what does this mean? In a word: congestion.

To exacerbate the problem:

* Since 2000 UDOT construction costs have increased 91 percent. In fact, recent reports show that steel has increased again by another 30 percent in the past few weeks alone.

* Funding for transportation was raided beginning 2001 when we experienced a downturn in the economy in order to keep public education funding whole. It took the legislature several years to bring funding levels back to pre-downturn totals. But demand for roads and the cost of construction outpaced our capacity to meet the demand several times over leaving us far behind.

So what steps have we taken without raising taxes?

* We looked internally for other funding options within existing budgets. We found that between 10 to 20 percent of the revenue from sales tax within the state came from auto related sales (car sales, tires, oil changes, etc). Many of us in the Legislature felt that these tax dollars should be earmarked for roads and so we pushed legislation through to capture this money. It is in place today.

* We are looking at ways to focus economic development in areas where the transportation system in unbalanced. In Northern Utah I-15 is a log jam southbound to SLC in the AM and the opposite in the afternoon leaving half the system underutilized. When placing incentives for economic development we, as a legislature, need to be conscious of balancing the transportation system and encouraging job growth closer to where people live.

Friends and Neighbors,

 The biggest news item from the State Capitol this week was that the projected budget surplus remained well above the $2 billion mark, even though it dropped a fraction of a percent from earlier forecasts. Earlier this session I explained how "a fraction" in state budget terms can actually be a huge amount of money, and that is true in this case. State economists lowered their surplus projection by $7 million,which to any of us is a fortune. But in terms of a $31.5 billion state budget, it's relative pocket change.

 How will this affect the rest of the session? Probably not a whole lot. The forecast is that we will have just shy of $34 billion to spend, and that is the number we will use to set the state budget. The economists warned that there is still an amount of uncertainty in the economy (witness this week's unexpected fall in the stock market) and we need to be prudent with spending and not leave ourselves in a tough situation if the economy takes a sudden downturn.