State and federal funds are limited or drying up, so cuts or local tax hikes are the only options.

If you don’t like the federal health care program signed into law by President Obama last March – and count us among those who don’t – Monday’s decision by a federal judge in Florida was good news.

U.S. District Judge Roger Vinson declared the entire law unconstitutional – not just the part of the law that requires all Americans to buy health insurance. The purchase mandate was the key provision in Vinson’s decision, but the judge said, in effect, that if that part of the law was bad, the whole thing was bad.

He had a point; when Congress was debating health care reform, many of its supporters argued that the law couldn’t work unless everyone was required to participate.