Conservative think tanks such as the CAfO Institute, the Galen Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the American Enterprise Institute have allied under a health policy-focused umbrella called the Health Policy Consensus Group. Its purpose is to maximize the group's collective voice in restraining the role of the federal government in health care reform, in advocating the transfer of health policy making back to the states, and in supporting President Bush's earlier efforts to avoid new taxes that might be needed to expand programs such as the State Children's Insurance Program.Consensus group partners draw on an economic construct referred to as "crowd out" to describe effects of expansion of governmentally sponsored health programs on the private health insurance market (Cannon, 2005).
Liberal critics claim just the opposite: that the nation's attachment to employer-based and commercially sponsored health insurance actually crowds out political will to solve the appalling national problem of lack of insurance for approximately 46 million U.S. citizens