Why Republicans can’t repeal Obamacare

By Jeffrey A. Tucker | Contributor

Absolutely amazing. Even tragic. The Republicans railed against the proven failure that is Obamacare for years and voted at least half a dozen times to repeal it. It was the most important issue of the entire 2016 election. 

Then the GOP gained control — House, Senate, presidency – and what happened? So far, nothing. 

There is no agreement on what a replacement should look like. It is entirely possible that four years from now, nothing important will have changed.

Who or what is at fault? 

People blame partisanship, special interests, public opinion, plots, bad leadership, lobbyists, feckless careerism, the Democrats, moderates, conservatives, the CBO, the media and Trump’s lack of interest in the details of the legislative process. But there is only one source of failure: the failure to understand. 

The root reason why Obamacare will last the current regime is intellectual. 

We should take it for granted that everyone in this debate wants more, better, cheaper health care for all. The intellectual failure is a lack of clarity about how to get there.

A real free market in health care would provide affordable, high-quality health care for all, not as a matter of right, but rather as a matter of market logic. 

How do we know? 

Look at any market that is largely free. The impossibly brilliant and complex smartphone went from luxury to mainstream in a mere 10 years. The same is true for millions of services, from groceries to clothing to home appliances to software. The driving logic of competitive markets is to provide universal access.

Even in other forms of health care that are free of government control, we see this trajectory. Pet care is affordable, universal and available at so many levels. Cosmetic surgery is the same. You can get nearly anything done to your body for less than the typical deductible of standard insurance. And consider free health care markets abroad: in a place like Lebanon, prices are one-tenth of the U.S. for great service.

In today’s peer-to-peer economy, I can get a burrito delivered to my desk for $6, with no advance subscription service. I can get my groceries brought to my home for a small service fee. I have access to all the world’s information in my pocket, most of it provided for free. 

But, at the same time, I and everyone else must pay exorbitant fees just to gain access to simple medicines to fix a sinus problem, and even then we risk being on the hook for more money than it would take to buy a nice car.

The system is not working, but there is no mystery about what would fix it: an open and competitive market. 

The free market delivers prosperity to all. It would do the same with conventional health care. The evidence for this assertion is everywhere around us, so present that ideologues have to shuck and jive to deny it.

Why can’t we get there? The people with decision-making power lack confidence in the solution simply because doing so would require a level of understanding which they seem either incapable of or unwilling to embrace. The belief that you can legislate your goals into being has subverted the courage it would take to repeal everything that stands between us and a free market.

— Jeffrey A. Tucker, “The Failure to Repeal Obamacare Is an Intellectual Failure. The full article appeared July 15 on fee.org, the Foundation for Economic Education’s website.