A counter proposal instead of repealing 0bamacare.
Via NRO
The past few months have seen some very promising new conservative reform initiatives emerging from Capitol Hill — ideas that build on the work of conservative wonks in the think-tank world and the academy and translate them into practical proposals. Senator Mike Lee has offered a very appealing tax-reform proposal and important ideas for transforming our approach to transportation and higher-education policy. Senator Marco Rubio and Representative Paul Ryan have outlined some promising improvements to the safety net.
And today, senators Tom Coburn, Orrin Hatch, and Richard Burr have proposed a conservative health-care reform that has enormous promise. Herewith, some quick (if not short, with apologies) thoughts on what they’ve offered.
The senators’ proposal in some respects builds on ideas that have been in various Republican proposals before (including the American Health Care Reform Act, proposed last year and co-sponsored by a majority of House Republicans), but it goes further and probably amounts to the most promising conservative health reform we have yet seen from Republican politicians. Its basic structure involves a version of the combination of reforms that James Capretta (for instance in this National Affairs essay with Robert Moffit) has been laying out in some detail in recent years, and which other conservatives (including Ramesh Ponnuru and myself) have pointed to: It would repeal Obamacare and instead address the key particular deficiencies of our health-care system in a way that enables more Americans to be genuine consumers and that employs actual competition among insurers and providers (giving them real freedom to shape products and business models) to restrain costs while expanding coverage.
The proposal would extend a tax credit for the purchase of health insurance to all Americans below 300 percent of the poverty level who do not have health coverage from a large employer. That credit (paid for largely by capping the tax exclusion for employer-provided coverage), would provide all of these Americans with the same benefit now extended only to people with employer-based coverage. The credit would be age- and income-based, and intended to enable the people receiving it to afford at least catastrophic coverage, and to far more easily purchase more comprehensive coverage if they choose to. It is designed in a way that would extend the benefit now only available in the employer system without destabilizing the employer system (as some proposals to fully replace the employer exclusion would do) — which strikes me as both substantively and politically wise.