Opinion

Let The Market Fix Health Care

[Shutterstock - Evgeny Atamanenko]

Ken Blackwell Former Ohio Secretary of State
Font Size:

Republicans agree that Obamacare has failed and must be repealed. But they can’t agree on the replacement “plan.”

The one thing they shouldn’t do is devise another grand scheme like the Obama “plan.” The answer is not a new and better Big Government “plan.” Instead, the president and Congress should take specific actions to free the market so patients and providers can create a health care system that serves everyone.

When President Barack Obama proposed his federal takeover of the health care system, he was right about one thing: American medical care was a mess. Government provided half the funding, created incentives for cost-plus care, and pushed insurance onto employers. While care cost more than it should for many, some people didn’t have access to the treatment they needed.

But instead of seeking to empower patients by giving them greater control over their own futures and more opportunities to find the best care possible in the marketplace, the president and Democrats in Congress took medical decisions away from the public and transferred them to Washington.

Unsurprisingly that approach didn’t work. Insurers, mandated to discard actuarial principles in order to cover patients with serious pre-existing conditions, were forced to offer one-size-fits-all policies to cover everything from falling hair to sex change procedures. No wonder the cost of health insurance spiked. People got stuck paying for “benefits” they didn’t want.

Washington’s coverage mandates forced companies to cancel health insurance plans that employees had relied on for years.  Patients were lucky to find replacements, and usually ended up paying a lot more for a lot less. Having coverage did not mean having access to care.

Young, healthy people who were supposed to sign up in greater numbers and pay a lot more to subsidize their well-off elders, understandably chose not to do so.

Insurance companies were stuck serving a sicker population, causing them to lose money and drop plans. The promises of Obamacare proved to be false.

Republicans correctly believe the misguided law must be repealed.  But what to replace it with, they ask.

The answer is nothing. At least, not in the sense of another comprehensive government program to set insurance requirements, mandate coverage, fix outcomes, and the like. Misguided government intervention created the health care mess we’ve got.  It’s time we allow economic incentives and free market principles to solve the problem.

The solution is to free the market to innovate and experiment, to find the best way to provide quality coverage for less cost. For example, health insurers should have a national marketplace. Let people buy medical plans across state lines like every other kind of insurance. And bar states from imposing special interest coverage mandates that raise health insurance premiums for everyone.

Moreover, employees, not employers, should control their health insurance coverage. After all, none of us expects our company to buy us homeowners or auto insurance. The tax deduction could be shifted to individuals from businesses, or eliminated entirely with an equivalent individual income tax cut.  Tax-free contributions to health savings accounts would enable people to finance the level of risk they’d be comfortable with.

The market today doesn’t have the flexibility to offer an answer, so government must get out of the way and encourage the private sector to do so.  Those of limited means could be subsidized through vouchers to purchase their own private insurance.  State high-risk pools could provide access to care for people with chronic or pre-existing conditions.

Medicaid needs to focus on the poor who have nowhere else to turn. Reform should emphasize allowing the states to provide better care for their most needy citizens without interference or mandates from Washington.  States that do the best job will serve as models for others.  Doctors who reject Washington’s cut-rate reimbursement rates need to be encouraged to re-enter the Medicare and Medicaid patient markets.

None of these measures constitutes a “plan” as such. Instead they each address a particular problem. In some cases they eliminate regulatory and tax barriers.  In others they repair bad government incentives.  In some instances they reward employers and providers of care to fill health care gaps.

The emphasis should be on addressing the individual problems in a coordinated manner.  A workable reform requires targeted fixes designed to work interdependently, instead of one big “plan” requiring so many political compromises and tradeoffs that it would be doomed from the start.

It’s particularly important to get the principles and language right. We need to change the way policymakers think.  Centralized government solutions don’t work regardless of who designs them.

We also need to change people’s expectations. The government should be the backstop for those without other options, not the protector of first resort.

The disaster called Obamacare provides an important reminder that we ignore at our peril.  It is a fact that even the most well-intentioned programs designed by politicians and run by federal bureaucrats do not work.  We can’t afford to ignore the lessons we’ve learned.

Instead, we need to restore and build on market principles that we know work, emphasizing the pragmatic over the ideological, and adapting to reality, not the world we wish existed.

People are suffering, so Congress needs to “fix” health care now.  But not by repeating Obamacare’s ham-handed approach.  Instead, policymakers should adopt a collection of logical steps to enable the marketplace to innovate and meet the diverse health care needs of the American people.

Ken Blackwell is a Senior Fellow at the American Civil Rights Union and the Family Research Council. He was a senior Domestic Policy Advisor to the Trump Transition Team.

PREMIUM ARTICLE: Subscribe To Keep Reading

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign Up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
BENEFITS READERS PASS PATRIOTS FOUNDERS
Daily and Breaking Newsletters
Daily Caller Shows
Ad Free Experience
Exclusive Articles
Custom Newsletters
Editor Daily Rundown
Behind The Scenes Coverage
Award Winning Documentaries
Patriot War Room
Patriot Live Chat
Exclusive Events
Gold Membership Card
Tucker Mug

What does Founders Club include?

Tucker Mug and Membership Card
Founders

Readers,

Instead of sucking up to the political and corporate powers that dominate America, The Daily Caller is fighting for you — our readers. We humbly ask you to consider joining us in this fight.

Now that millions of readers are rejecting the increasingly biased and even corrupt corporate media and joining us daily, there are powerful forces lined up to stop us: the old guard of the news media hopes to marginalize us; the big corporate ad agencies want to deprive us of revenue and put us out of business; senators threaten to have our reporters arrested for asking simple questions; the big tech platforms want to limit our ability to communicate with you; and the political party establishments feel threatened by our independence.

We don't complain -- we can't stand complainers -- but we do call it how we see it. We have a fight on our hands, and it's intense. We need your help to smash through the big tech, big media and big government blockade.

We're the insurgent outsiders for a reason: our deep-dive investigations hold the powerful to account. Our original videos undermine their narratives on a daily basis. Even our insistence on having fun infuriates them -- because we won’t bend the knee to political correctness.

One reason we stand apart is because we are not afraid to say we love America. We love her with every fiber of our being, and we think she's worth saving from today’s craziness.

Help us save her.

A second reason we stand out is the sheer number of honest responsible reporters we have helped train. We have trained so many solid reporters that they now hold prominent positions at publications across the political spectrum. Hear a rare reasonable voice at a place like CNN? There’s a good chance they were trained at Daily Caller. Same goes for the numerous Daily Caller alumni dominating the news coverage at outlets such as Fox News, Newsmax, Daily Wire and many others.

Simply put, America needs solid reporters fighting to tell the truth or we will never have honest elections or a fair system. We are working tirelessly to make that happen and we are making a difference.

Since 2010, The Daily Caller has grown immensely. We're in the halls of Congress. We're in the Oval Office. And we're in up to 20 million homes every single month. That's 20 million Americans like you who are impossible to ignore.

We can overcome the forces lined up against all of us. This is an important mission but we can’t do it unless you — the everyday Americans forgotten by the establishment — have our back.

Please consider becoming a Daily Caller Patriot today, and help us keep doing work that holds politicians, corporations and other leaders accountable. Help us thumb our noses at political correctness. Help us train a new generation of news reporters who will actually tell the truth. And help us remind Americans everywhere that there are millions of us who remain clear-eyed about our country's greatness.

In return for membership, Daily Caller Patriots will be able to read The Daily Caller without any of the ads that we have long used to support our mission. We know the ads drive you crazy. They drive us crazy too. But we need revenue to keep the fight going. If you join us, we will cut out the ads for you and put every Lincoln-headed cent we earn into amplifying our voice, training even more solid reporters, and giving you the ad-free experience and lightning fast website you deserve.

Patriots will also be eligible for Patriots Only content, newsletters, chats and live events with our reporters and editors. It's simple: welcome us into your lives, and we'll welcome you into ours.

We can save America together.

Become a Daily Caller Patriot today.

Signature

Neil Patel