Catamount Health Architect On Health Care Reform

AP Photo/Seth Perlman

Sometimes it's hard to resist a metaphor: the national health care reform bill may not be quite dead yet, but it's at best on life support.

Democrats lost their ability to block a threatened Republican filibuster of the health reform bill with the special election victory of Republican Scott Brown in Massachusetts. Brown has pledged to oppose the bill.

So if President Obama's plan for a national health care reform bill dies in the nation's Capitol, is there anything significant states can do without help from the federal government to change the system?

VPR's Mitch Wertlieb put the question to Ken Thorpe, a health policy researcher at Emory University in Atlanta, who is also one of the chief architects of Vermont's Catamount Health Plan. 

Click listen to hear the interview.