Avik Roy shares with National Review Online readers a plan for addressing the major flaws in the Affordable Care Act.
One thing you often hear conservatives say about Obamacare is that it represents “the government takeover of the U.S. health-care system.” This is not precisely true. The actual government takeover of the U.S. health-care system took place in 1965, when Lyndon Johnson signed into law the bills enacting Medicare and Medicaid: the “Great Society.”
Medicare and Medicaid were — and are — single-payer, government-run health-insurance programs for the elderly and the poor, respectively. Today, more than a quarter of the U.S. population is on single-payer health care, thanks to Medicare and Medicaid. These programs have profoundly distorted the U.S. health-care system, in ways that make health care more expensive for everyone else. Well before anyone had heard of Barack Obama, Medicare and Medicaid had America on a path to bankruptcy. …
… Obamacare builds on the LBJ legacy, to be sure. The law expands the scale and scope of the Medicaid program. Overall, Obamacare increases federal health-care spending by about 15 percent. But in 2012, U.S. government entities were already spending $4,160 on health care for every man, woman, and child in the country. That’s more than all but two other countries in the entire world.
When it comes to government health-care spending, then, the U.S. is actually worse off than most of the European countries at which we wrinkle our noses. Indeed, when it comes to economic freedom, the U.S. has fallen behind many of its European competitors. …
… The impressive results of Switzerland and Singapore drive home a powerful message: that health care works best when individuals have more control over their own health spending. The Left can’t bring itself to believe this; there, it’s an article of faith that “disinterested” government experts will make better and more cost-efficient decisions for you than you would make for yourself. …
… Instead of forcing Americans to buy insurance plans that they neither need nor want — the Obamacare way — we should convert the exchanges into real marketplaces, places where people can voluntarily buy coverage that is suited to them. We can do this by repealing Obamacare’s individual and employer mandates, and by rolling back the plethora of new federal regulations and tax hikes that make insurance more costly without improving its quality.
