Even conservatives could get something they like starting from the ACA. There are just so many possible directions policy can go with the ACA as the first step. I’ve long thought this and even posted as much last year.
Ezra Klein just repeated the basic argument, which he’s made before too (if memory serves).
Conservatives have long wanted to convert the employer-provided tax deduction to a refundable tax credit that everyone gets, regardless of employment status. Liberals fought this because the individual market is a mess. The insurance is expensive and the insurers can reject you for preexisting conditions. Unwinding the employer-based market isn’t a good idea if it means tossing people into something worse.
But the Affordable Care Act fixes the individual market: It regulates insurers, makes sure people with preexisting conditions can get coverage and pools individual risk into collective bargaining power so insurers will compete to offer better deals. So now liberals are a lot more willing to look at flattening the tax code and moving past the employer-based market. The excise tax, in fact, is a step toward doing exactly that.
The bigger prize here is, of course, Medicare and Medicaid. Taken together, the two single-payer programs comprise most of the government’s control over the health-care sector. But if the Affordable Care Act’s exchanges work well and the program’s delivery-system reforms bring down costs, you could imagine eventually moving the two programs onto the exchanges, where beneficiaries would then be able to choose between the government insurer and a suite of private options. To some degree, that’s what Paul Ryan is proposing for Medicare, but since he coupled it with repeal of the Affordable Care Act and vouchers that grow much more slowly than health-care costs, he made the idea completely unacceptable. But as his former co-sponsor Alice Rivlin has argued, if Republicans dropped those demands and left traditional Medicare as an option, the plan would be much more attractive to Democrats.
Ezra’s full post is not that much longer. Worth a read.
