During this past spring and summer’s debates over Republican efforts to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, GOP leaders insisted that states should be given greater flexibility over health care. Their support for states’ rights relating to health care, however, seems to be fickle.
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Last year -- over at Notice & Comment -- I blogged about two laws in Arizona that were taking seemed to be extreme forms of state-level preemption. SB 1847 provided that if the state Attorney General concluded that a local government had passed a local law that was preempted by state law, the state could withhold all state funding from the locality. Meanwhile, SB 1524 provided -- in incredibly broad and vague terms -- that a local government "may not take any action that materially increases the regulatory burdens on a business unless there is a threat to the health, safety and welfare of the public that has not been addressed by legislation or industry regulation within the proposed regulated field."
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