How to stop losing the health-care debate — VOICES for REASON

Conservatives—and, more broadly, many on the right—are horrified that ObamaCare is getting close to becoming a reality, and rightly so. Indeed, many have been horrified for months, as ominous proposal after ominous proposal has been put forward. Take the recent flirtation with a “Medicare buy-in.” Medicare has, by some estimates, $60 trillion in unfunded liabilities—and over half the Senate was willing to extend this fiscal train-wreck to cover everyone from 55 to 65. Or take the House and Senate requirement forcing insurers to sell policies to individuals with preexisting conditions for the same price as everyone else. This is like forcing a company to sell fire insurance to someone whose house has just burned down. Why would a young, healthy person buy health insurance and pay premiums for years when he can just buy it the first time he gets sick—with a $750 slap on the wrist (the penalty for not buying “mandatory” insurance)?

Such proposals make it easy to demonize liberals as the health-care villains. But conservatives must share in the blame for the likely passage of ObamaCare.

How can I claim this, when conservatives have been denouncing the President’s health-care proposals since well before he got in office? Because they have failed to offer a compelling alternative to ObamaCare.

Here’s a quick quiz to illustrate this. Off the top of your head, name the most important and influential proposals raised in the health-care debate. Here’s what I came up with: “universal health-care system”; “public option”; “insurance mandate”; “preexisting condition”; “Medicare buy-in.”

Important: even though we have supposedly had a health-care “debate,” all of these prominent proposals were made by liberals. Try to think about a prominent proposal made by conservatives—it’s hard. It’s easy to remember conservative opposition to specific liberal proposals—complaints that we can’t afford it, asking if we want the Post Office or DMV as our doctor, etc—but as for a distinctive solution to America’s health-care problems (in particular, rapid increases in the price of health care year after year), we have heard almost nothing from conservatives. (Or worse than nothing—see “A Republican government takeover of health care.“)

By the default of conservatives, the liberals look like the only game in town. But isn’t this odd, given that conservatives are self-proclaimed devotees of the “free market”? Surely they ought to have a lot to say about one of the most ominous attempts to inject government into health care—and be bursting with proposals to remove government from the health care market to make it freer. If conservatives really believe in the free market, why haven’t they banded together and advocated a free-market solution?

More on this soon.