When reforming healthcare, remember, markets work

President Trump, House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell are not going to replace the American healthcare system with a free market. There are just too many obstacles, political, moral and economic.

But the Republican Party does have a chance to create small experiments in market-based healthcare amidst the tangle of safety net programs, and outside the reach of Byzantine insurance regulations. If they write a bill that allows these experiments by either states, individuals, or organizations, they might transform the industry in the long run and perhaps beat back the Left's hitherto relentless march toward socialized healthcare.

Creating room for such market forces would make a Republican bill worth supporting.

Obamacare's disastrous premise was that a safety net should be placed into the market when individuals buy their health coverage. Put another way, Democrats decided to run the welfare system for non-poor, sick people through Aetna, Blue Cross and Cigna. This involved a Rube Goldberg contrivance of regulations, mandates, bailouts and taxes. Unsurprisingly, this has gone terribly awry. The exchanges are sclerotic and premiums have surged higher rather than being tamed.

Republican talk of tearing up Obamacare "root and branch" has run into the political reality that most people don't think healthcare should be unavailable to people without money. It is widely, if not generally, agreed that insurers should not be allowed to refuse to provide coverage for people who have ailments that need treating when they first show up to buy insurance. It isn't "insurance," strictly speaking, but the public is uninterested in either actuarial niceties or semantics.