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Life Health > Health Insurance > Health Insurance

View: Sorry, Jindal is still wrong about health care

By Ramesh Ponnuru

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(Bloomberg View) — Conservatives continue to debate how (or whether) to replace the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA).

See also: Republicans need a plan if ‘Obamacare’ collapses.

Some of us argue that a replacement should be competitive with Obamacare on coverage: that it should enable roughly the same number of people to buy coverage while increasing competition, cutting taxes, protecting individual choice and reducing government involvement in health care.

And so we favor eliminating Obamacare, capping the tax break for employer-provided coverage, and providing everyone who doesn’t have such coverage with a tax credit that could be used to buy insurance that (at least) covers catastrophic health expenses.

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal disagrees, favoring an alternative that would result in millions of people losing their coverage and deriding the higher-coverage proposals of other conservatives as “Obamacare Lite.”

In response to my criticism of his idea, Jindal argues that his plan would have the advantage of lowering insurance premiums, and that the disadvantage I mention — it would result in millions of people losing their health insurance — is a “feature” rather than a “bug.”

The governor stacks the deck in comparing alternatives. The tax-credit option would also put downward pressure on premiums, and doesn’t involve “trying to mandate coverage through new regulations, taxes and Washington diktats,” as he puts it.

On coverage numbers, Jindal has talked himself into a perverse position. It would be, he says, a capitulation to the left for conservatives to back policies that would make it easier for millions of people to buy health insurance. But it’s Jindal who agrees with the left that the U.S. has to choose between conservatism and affordable coverage for all. He’s the one who thinks that if a plan results in such coverage, it is by definition not conservative

That’s the real capitulation, and it’s one conservatives shouldn’t make.

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