Max Bloom writes at National Review Online that the national health care debate omits critical questions.

Suppose it strikes you as fundamentally irrational that a 25-year-old should take the risk of paying several thousand dollars or more (or, in the highly unlikely but possible worst case, maybe tens of thousands more) should he get sick. Suppose this strikes you in fact as the height of youthful irresponsibility. Well then, so what? Is it our job to prevent him from making this bad decision?

That isn’t a rhetorical question: Many people believe that, yes, in fact, it is our job. I take the conservative side that it is not our job; that liberty is a great thing, that liberty entails choice, and that choice entails foolishness and bad decisions. I’m not a maximalist on this: I’m okay, for instance, with mandatory savings accounts and government nudges and other things that encroach on totally free choice. But I do believe that choice is enough of a virtue, and irresponsibility on the scale here not such a vice, that we should let people in cases like this choose which health plans to buy. Now, you may agree with me or disagree with me, but either way, that’s the debate. The question of how much choice we’re willing to allow customers to make — can they buy skimpy plans? can they decline to buy plans altogether? — will dictate to an enormous degree the system of health care we end up adopting.

Yet it is a debate that no one seems interested in grappling with anymore.