In my ongoing campaign to get everyone involved in public debate to be specific about what they're talking about, I'll point to this argument, from The Economist:
[the Affordable Care Act] is exactly the result of 30 years of liberals letting go of the idea of a simple, centralised government programme of national health insurance, and instead devising increasingly market-based, decentralised, Friedmanite or Hayekian systems to achieve universal access to health care through private health-insurance corporations. I literally cannot imagine a more market-based, private-sector system for universal health insurance than the one that the Democrats implemented last fall. In all the world, a world which contains many conservative-leaning countries beside the United States (Switzerland, Japan), there is no more private-sector-oriented universal health-insurance system than ObamaCare.
When you ask conservatives these days what they'd like to do about health care if the ACA is repealed, they tend to offer some words about how government regulation is harmful, and we need to unleash the free market to work its magic to solve the system's problems -- bring down costs, expand coverage, and improve care. But as this debate proceeds, anyone who says something like that ought to be asked: where in health care, exactly, is there not enough free market, to the extent that more free market could be inserted, and things would get better? After all, we've got private doctors, and private hospitals, and private insurers, and private device makers, and private pretty much everything. If the free market will create the best health-care system possible, why hasn't it worked yet?
-- Paul Waldman
