Minnesota has yet to cast off the welfare-state quality of its Scandinavian heritage, including in health care policy. In the recently concluded legislative session, the nanny state got slightly more ingrained, with the Democratic legislature and the Republican governor engaging in bipartisan cooperation to ban smoking in nearly all public places.

The Saint Paul Pioneer Press said that elected officials ‘tinkered around the edges’ of health care. Democrats pushed a plan to expand government-directed health care insurance for children (a popular initiative in many states), and ended up adding another 53,000 people to government programs. In other words, not much has changed. Things could have been better. But they could have turned out to be much worse.