Conservatives Still Don’t Have a Health Care Plan

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Matt Yglesias, who’s made of sterner stuff than me, read the cover story of National Review this week. It’s a long, detailed description of a conservative replacement for Obamacare, and it’s the same proposal that “serious” conservatives have been making for years. Here’s the meat of it:

The core of a replacement would be a change in the tax treatment of health insurance. The tax break for coverage would be flattened and capped so that people would not get a bigger break the more comprehensive their insurance. The break would also be extended to people who do not have access to employer coverage….Once a robust market for individually purchased insurance has emerged, the problem of people who are locked out of that market because of preexisting conditions should diminish: People will have both the incentive and the ability to buy cheap, renewable catastrophic policies before getting sick.

What should I say about this? If I don’t take it seriously, then I’m being snide and dismissive even though conservatives have done what I asked for and presented a real alternative to Obamacare. But if I do take it seriously, I’m just pretending. Because this plan is, and always has been, ridiculous. And conservatives know it.

Catastrophic insurance is already available to individuals, but there’s no robust market for it. Nor will different tax treatment change that: Insurers will continue to discriminate based on health status; they won’t offer renewable policies to everyone; and policies will remain too expensive for low-income workers. Being able to buy them with pretax dollars won’t change that, since most low-income workers don’t pay very much—or any—federal income tax in the first place. A tax credit or a subsidy might help, but then you’re back to Obamacare—except that instead of offering poor people subsidies for actual health care, you’re offering them only the opportunity to make premium payments for a policy that probably won’t do them any good and that they can’t afford. So they won’t buy them.

So why does this proposal have such legs among the right? Partly it’s because it’s something, at least, and it has enough moving parts that you can fool some people into thinking it might work. But it’s also due to the odd conservative obsession with the fact that health insurance, as currently provided, isn’t true insurance. It doesn’t protect you against big but unlikely events, like auto insurance or fire insurance. It simply pays for health care. And that’s true. But who cares? Conservatives need to get beyond that semantic hobbyhorse and instead address the problem that most Americans want addressed: provision of health care. If you don’t want to call it insurance, fine. Just call it health care coverage. And then explain how you’re going to provide that cheaply and efficiently to as many people as possible.

Once you do that, you run into a hard, shiny nugget that you can’t wiggle around: about a third of the country, maybe more, just flatly can’t afford decent health care for their families. No amount of smooth talk about HSAs and tax treatment and catastrophic care will change that. So you can either pay for this coverage via tax dollars or you can let them go without, and chalk it up to nature red in tooth and claw.

Insurance is a red herring. It’s not the primary cause of high health care costs in America, and offering different kinds of insurance, or making it available across state lines, won’t change things by more than a hair. The problem is the actual provision of health care. If you want to do that via a private sector middleman, that’s fine. Unnecessary, but fine. But you still have to pay for the actual health care somehow. When conservatives have a plan for that, let me know.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate