The Republican Alternative to Obamacare

Courtesy of Jonathan Chait, and apropos of what I was saying the other day, here’s a nice clear reminder of what the GOP offers as an alternative to Obamacare:

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Obama wants the health-care system to do more to pool risk — which is to say, to shift the burden of covering the sick onto the healthy. Republicans want it to do less to pool risk, so that healthy people can be free of the burden of subsidizing the costs of those less medically fortunate.

… Obama’s plan is to make unpopular individual health insurance more like the popular employer-based health insurance, with lots of cross-subsidies from healthy to sick. The conservative plans propose to make popular employer insurance more like the unpopular individual market.

…You could [do what the Republicans propose], but then it wouldn’t be insurance anymore. It would be a system in which you pay for a doctor out of pocket.

The whole idea of insurance is pooling risk.  The Republicans are making an appeal to the small section of people who think they aren’t at risk and trying to make them resent having to participate in the larger risk pool.