Part of the genius of our Constitution is its division of powers between federal and state governments. To prevent tyranny, the founders enumerated the limited powers the federal government would have. Wisely, they included the 10th Amendment of the Bill of Rights, stating the states and the people retained all powers not delegated to the federal government by the Constitution. That division of powers is called federalism.

One of the many benefits of federalism is that when one state has a program that ends in failure, others can avoid making that mistake. Some states, for example, have imposed heavy government control of medical care, with negative and even disastrous effects on costs. While that is unfortunate for residents of those states -- most notably Massachusetts -- the harm of those experiments to the American people as a whole is minimized.

Sadly, the Democrat-run Congress is ignoring those lessons -- and federalism -- by pushing ObamaCare socialized medicine, which would put Washington in control of medical care.

That effort is unpopular with the American people, though, so Senate Democrats devised a new way to try to win support. They said the legislation would let states "opt out" of a federally run "public option" health insurance plan.

But pressure on states to "opt in" would be intense. Everybody wants "free money." And, writes former Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt, "Financial subsidies for a public plan ... would be financed by taxpayers -- by taxpayers in all fifty states. States would not be allowed to opt out of having their residents pay these federal taxes. They would only be allowed to opt out of receiving their share of the federal subsidies."

So states that opt out would be punished with taxes whose revenue would be sent to other states.

The opt-out provision is a clever way to get the federal government's nose further into the medical care tent.

What we really need is for Washington to "opt out" of dictating medical care.