When reforming healthcare, remember, markets work

[Valin]

Washington Examiner

Washington Examiner

Jul 5, 2017

 

President Trump, House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell are not going to replace the American healthcare system with a free market. There are just too many obstacles, political, moral and economic.

But the Republican Party does have a chance to create small experiments in market-based healthcare amidst the tangle of safety net programs, and outside the reach of Byzantine insurance regulations. If they write a bill that allows these experiments by either states, individuals, or organizations, they might transform the industry in the long run and perhaps beat back the Left's hitherto relentless march toward socialized healthcare.

Creating room for such market forces would make a Republican bill worth supporting.

 

 

(Snip)

 

Competitive federalism and markets could reform healthcare in a way former President Barack Obama and his Health and Human Services secretary, Kathleen Sebelius, never imagined. This would probably require accepting a more explicit safety net than Obamacare created. But the alternative is to lurch into a socialist healthcare system like those in other countries that demonstrate every day why they are undesirable.