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Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper came to the capital of government gridlock to offer a solution. Hickenlooper, chairman of the National Governors Association, said Tuesday that Congress and the White House should look to how states are governing themselves as a model for getting beyond the partisanship that has stymied action in Washington. ... Governors also would like Congress to reauthorize Head Start and the Children' Health Insurance Program, and find a better way to fund transportation projects. They also are calling for streamlining the way states institute alternative approaches, called waivers, to the Medicaid program that provides health care for the poor. (Theobald, 1/6)

On health care, the governors called on Congress to adopt more than 40 recommendations NGA shared with the Department of Health and Human Services last year. Those include streamlining approval of Medicaid expansion waivers and encouraging state innovation by helping to make successful state programs permanent and sharing savings that result from state-driven reforms. (Chokshi, 1/6)

Two Republican governors tried to convince President Barack Obama Tuesday to let them impose work requirements on new Medicaid recipients as a condition for expanding the program — but all they got was a listening session and a lively debate. North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory and Utah Gov. Gary Herbert, who met with Obama at the White House Tuesday as members of the National Governors Association executive committee, sounded optimistic after the meeting and told reporters that Obama did not reject the idea out of hand. But they acknowledged that he didn’t make any promises either, and said their next step would be to talk to Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell about getting waivers to try their approach. HHS has agreed to some state flexibility under Medicaid in the past but has not accepted work requirements when states sought to link them to Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act. (Nather, 1/6)

At a White House meeting with President Barack Obama Tuesday, Gov. Pat McCrory raised the possibility of waiving federal rules on Medicaid expansion for North Carolina. ... McCrory said he asked the president about a waiver that could allow the state to require a job or job training as a condition of eligibility. He said the president “said he would be open to certain waivers that I’m looking at to potentially present to my legislature.” “We did not get assurances, but I thought we got a pretty good response about what the governor of Utah and I are thinking along the same lines,” McCrory said after his meeting. (Morrill and Kumar, 1/6)