The second enrollment period for Obamacare ends on Feb. 15. Are you covered? If you are holding out in the hope that Obamacare will be repealed by the newly-elected Republican Congress, I have bad news for you: It won’t. Obamacare, according to the raw data, has resulted in a net total of 8.5 million more Americans with insurance. Repealing Obamacare would take away the insurance of all those Americans and, therefore, be political suicide. Unfortunately, repeal would upset Americans just as much as when their employer insurance was eliminated. What the Republicans need is a plan to deal with Obamacare without unicorns.
Before getting into the plan, it is important to look at a brief history of health insurance in America. America’s health insurance was bad — problematic at best. This is something few conservatives seem to grasp. Liberals pointed to numbers like 60 million uninsured Americans in 2000, but the real problem was in the system itself. The employer-based health insurance system was extremely inefficient and discouraged real free-market innovation because there was no link between those paying for the insurance and the companies providing it. If you asked any American with health insurance who was paying for it, he would tell you that his employer was. However, any economist would tell you that the employee was paying for health insurance through the opportunity cost of a higher wage. So insurance companies were operating with little accountability to the consumer. The mastermind behind the entire system of health insurance was Hillsdale’s favorite president: Franklin Delano Roosevelt. So a simple repeal would actually be a small step backwards.
Fast forward to today and we realize that Obamacare’s marketplace (just the marketplace) is at least a good idea in principle. It finally establishes a direct link between the consumer and the product. So Obama’s foreign policy may be worse than Jimmy Carter’s, but at least his economic policies are better than FDR’s (which is not much to brag about really). The problem is everything else, from its management and regulations to the billions of federal dollars and individual mandate; and don’t get me started on the genius business model that only sells its product 3 months out of the year. The point is there are a few aspects of Obamacare that Congress can work with and others that they should squash. (Hello, mandate.)
Congress should scale back the suffocating regulations of Health and Human Services and fix the “private” marketplace exchanges that Obamacare set up. At the moment it attracts too much of what our own Professor of History Burt Folsom would call “political entrepreneurs.” Repeal may be a good word to placate conservative voters, but it is not a realistic policy goal and further solidifies the notion that Republicans are the party of “no” without any real policy solutions. Republicans should take the chance to push health care in a free-market direction. Keep the name, “Affordable Care Act,” change the implementation, taxes, subsidies, and mandate. That way Republicans could keep the 8.5 million people insured, but still change Obamacare. The time for trying to declare Obamacare unconstitutional is over; that ship has sailed.
Healthcare was a national issue because of FDR’s poor policy. Thanks to Obama, it is on the national stage, but the Republicans can take it from here.
