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The Spectacle Blog
Judging from the comments, there seems to be widespread misunderstanding of my post yesterday about what Republicans could have done differently in the run-up to Obamacare. I reject completely the idea that negotiating with the Democrats in 2009-10 would have produced any meaningfully conservative results. I am not advocating any “Obamacare lite” or slower adoption of government-run health care.
The exact opposite: Republicans should have championed policies that move health care in a more free-market direction, with fewers mandates and regulations, with more freedom for consumers to choose. They should have removed the distortions in the tax code that make it difficult for people to obtain health insurance apart from their employer.
It was actually Republican indifference to free-market health care reform that produced Obamacare Lite as well as Obamacare. When we hear about the conservative/Republican pedigree of the individual mandate, that history is almost entirely a product of conservatives looking around for some alternative to Hillarycare’s employer mandate, grabbing something that was supported by a handful of wonks, and then hoping the issue would go away. But the fact is that public discontent with rising health care costs, which endanger political support for limited government more generally by eating away at wage growth, didn’t go away. Neither did some level of concern about the uninsured.
The final outcome was that the country ended up with Obamacare. Our best hope for Obamacare’s repeal is the election of a former governor who is perhaps the only Republican in the country to try to seriously promote Obamacare Lite at the state level, helping to further implicate the GOP in the history of the individual mandate.
I think, and have written repeatedly, that Republicans were right to throw themselves in the tracks two years ago and hope they could stop the oncoming Obamacare train. But if they had dealt with health care on free-market terms when they ran the government, they might have been able to derail it before it left the station.
View all comments (6) | Leave a comment
More Blog Posts by W. James Antle, III
http://spectator.org/blog/2012/07/03/health-care-reform-and-gop-alt
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ncatty| 7.3.12 @ 10:58AM
My wife and I pay about 800/mo for our health insurance with BCBS. Although it is a lot, we have never had a billing or coverage dispute. I had colon cancer 10 years ago and went through 2 rounds of chemo, radiation and surgery. With copays and so forth it probably cost another $15,000 out of pocket over 2 years. The total bill paid by BCBS was a lot more. Most of my expense was deductible. I was not "re-underwritten" by BCBS. So, health care is expensive and so is health insurance, but the treatment I received was very good. The idea that we can lower our healthcare costs in some way is unrealistic. We really get what we pay for.
fmm| 7.3.12 @ 12:41PM
This is where the proponents of free market driven health care fall down, by not explaining why the market approach will bring down costs. A main reason is that there are two overheads in current health care, the companies and the governments. Want to guess which is larger? Get rid of it and costs immediately go down. A second reason is that insurance companies are shielded from competition because of the deals they have made with government. They can then charge higher premiums compared to those in a truly competetive market. So both the insurance companies and the government are responsilbe for extra high costs. Breaking their alliance is the best way to make progress.
Bob K| 7.3.12 @ 12:50PM
OK. Now I understand what you meant.
Looking forward to your expanded article on this!
Conservative Bob| 7.3.12 @ 3:21PM
Mr. Antle, Thank you for the clarification.
Jocon307 | 7.5.12 @ 4:13AM
This is exactly right (I don't know if I remember your first post).
Republicans must have thought all the problems with health insurance were just going to "go away" after Hillarycare was defeated. But of course they did not.
Republicans better be ready to do some actual work this time, should they get the chance. They need to stop trying to play based on the other team's playbook and do the hard work needed to get this country back on the right track.
If they don't they'll likely be finished, sadly so will the rest of us.