In today’s Wall Street Journal, Yuval Levin and Ramesh Ponnuru argue that conservatives now have a prime opportunity to offer a “credible alternative” to ObamaCare that would not only solve the serious problems of the healthcare system but would prevent a further lurch to the left if the current law fails:
Seeing the pileup, Republicans might be tempted to step aside and let ObamaCare continue to disappoint and infuriate Americans. After all, the GOP doesn’t have the power to repeal the law, or even to make meaningful changes to undo its worst effects. So why not just watch the Democrats pay the price for their folly?
But such passivity would actually protect the Democrats from paying that price. What Republicans can and should do is offer the public something better. Now is the time to advance a conservative reform that can solve the serious, discrete problems of the health-care system in place before ObamaCare, but without needlessly upending people’s arrangements or threatening what works in American medicine. That the Democrats are now making things worse doesn’t mean the public wants to keep that prior system, or that Republicans should.
The biggest Republican misconception about health care is that the system before ObamaCare was a free-market paradise. On the contrary: It has consisted chiefly of massive and inefficient entitlements that threaten to bankrupt the nation; the lopsided tax treatment of employer-provided coverage that creates incentives for waste and overspending; and an underdeveloped individual market struggling to fill the gaps.
