Iowa Republicans outlined a fairly modest health insurance reform plan at a press conference today.

Briefly, here are the high points: They would create some sort of online hub of information for consumers to find information about insurance plans, they would prevent insurance companies from dropping coverage due to preexisting conditions if a customer switches plans within the same insurance company (but, notably, not if a customer switches to a different company), and they would require insurance companies to give customers incentives for quitting smoking and making other healthy decisions.

The only problem? All of these ideas require maintaining the state-based regulatory system that the national GOP is aggressively trying to eliminate.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, U.S. Sen. John McCain (R-Arizona) proposed allowing consumers to buy insurance plans across state lines. Since then, GOP leaders in congress have latched on to the idea and continue to promote it as the best way to keep costs down, and Iowa’s own Republican members of congress have expressed support for it.

Conveniently, this idea gives Republicans an ideologically-consistent, free-market-based solution to the problems of health care. They can continue to argue that the market needs less regulation, not more, and they can deflect criticism that they don’t have health care policy ideas of their own.

Less convenient for local Republicans is the fact that such a proposal would probably prevent states from regulating health insurance at all. If insurance plans could be purchased across state lines, every insurance company would move to the state with the fewest regulations, where no other states’ laws could touch them. It would spark what policy wonks call a “race to the bottom.”

Essentially, it would create a South Dakota of health insurance, just like what exists now for credit card companies, and any efforts to regulate insurance at the state level would be all but impossible.

I admit I was not at the Iowa GOP’s press conference  today, so I do not know for sure whether this question was asked. Based on media reports that I have read, I don’t think it was, and that’s too bad. It’s a glaring inconsistency between national and local Republicans that should probably be addressed.