It's the Heritage Individual Mandate Debate All Over Again

A group of prominent conservatives recently released an ObamaCare replacement plan that would replicate many of that law’s worst features. As I explain in a new post at Darwin’s Fool, conservatives need to examine this proposal closely against the alternative. An excerpt:

If you’re a conservative and you’re reading this, chances are good you have a gun to your head. Conservatives are so averse to health policy, National Review‘s Ramesh Ponnuru once quipped that “Republicans will do anything to repeal ObamaCare–except think about health care.” This is no small problem. Indeed, it is how we got ObamaCare in the first place: conservative neglect enabled a raft of very un-conservative health care ideas to germinate at the Heritage Foundation for a decade and a half. By the time Democrats picked up those ideas and ran with them in 2009, it was too late. Conservatives were powerless to stop them.

Conservatives may indeed be just one election away from repealing ObamaCare, which is all to the good. But some conservatives have proposed replacing ObamaCare with refundable tax credits for health-insurance.  Tax credits are ObamaCare-lite. They would cement in place many of ObamaCare’s worst features, and replicate its awful results. If those features acquire a bipartisan imprimatur, we will never in our lifetimes be rid of them. Unless conservatives give tax credits the scrutiny they should have applied to the Heritage Foundation plan in the 1990s, they will make the same mistake all over again.

Conservatives don’t have to repeat history. A better set of reforms offers a clear path toward a market system, and away from ObamaCare, by building on the bedrock conservative idea of health savings accounts (HSAs). “Large” HSAs would deliver better, more affordable, and more secure health care, particularly for the most vulnerable. At the same time, Large HSAs would give workers a larger effective tax cut than all the Reagan and Bush tax cuts combined, and nine times larger than repealing ObamaCare.

Read the whole thing.