As a frequent critic of Obamacare, I'm often asked, "Well, how would you solve the problem? Huh?" The implication is that if I don't have a solution, I should shut up and endorse the one Democrats provided.
This is not sound policy thinking. As I am fond of saying, "The existence of a problem does not therefore imply the existence of a solution." It is not inevitably true that there is some policy solution that would be better than the status quo, even if we really dislike the status quo. For example, Russia getting all frisky in Ukraine makes me nervous as hell. I would like President Barack Obama to make it stop. That doesn't mean that Obama can make it stop. It is quite possible that any strenuous attempt to make it stop would simply imbue the Russian government with even more theatrical military ambitions.
As it happens, however, I did have an alternative plan for the Affordable Care Act, one that I was very fond of. It preserved the basic market mechanisms in health care while protecting people from catastrophic risks. It was so simple it could be explained in a couple of sentences. And it wouldn't cost that much. Ready? Here we go: The government picks up 100 percent of health-care costs above 15 to 20 percent of adjusted gross income. For people below 150 percent of the poverty line, there's Medicaid, which picks up basically all your costs. Hard to game, preserves consumer incentives to shop for prices and keeps people out of bankruptcy....
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