Today, in his remarks to the House of Representatives following his election as speaker, Paul Ryan reiterated his belief that “we can renew the America idea.” This recalls Ryan’s excellent speech on the fateful night of the Obamacare vote, on March 21, 2010, when he proclaimed,
“This moment may mark a temporary conclusion of the health-care debate, but its place in history has not yet been decided. If this passes, the quest to reclaim the American idea is not over. The fight to reapply our founding principles is not finished. It is just a steeper hill to climb, and it is a climb that we will make!”
Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that, back then, Ryan was the strongest voice in the fight against Obamacare. In addition to his floor speech on the night of the vote, he provided a devastating critique of Obamacare’s finances at the “Health Summit,” and he fought Obamacare with vigor and intelligence.
Nearly six years have since passed. In the last year or so, Republicans have started to unite around an Obamacare alternative, based upon the “Winning Alternative to Obamacare” originally advanced by the 2017 Project (which I ran and Bill Kristol chaired). Virginia Senate candidate Ed Gillespie ran on that alternative, House Budget Committee chairman Tom Price based his alternative upon it and has gotten 79 cosponsors to sign on (including Jeb Hensarling, Trey Gowdy, Marsha Blackburn, and Republican Study Committee chairman Bill Flores), and Scott Walker and Jeb Bush based their presidential-campaign proposals upon it.
The crux of such an alternative is to repeal all of Obamacare and offer simple, non-income-based tax credits to Americans who don’t get insurance through their employer, thereby breathing life into an individual market that the federal government choked off. In short, such an alternative would fix the inequity in the tax code that has long been at the root of our health-care woes, without foolishly taking aim at employer-based insurance. As such, it would maximize the chance for repeal while moving things in a conservative direction from the pre-Obamacare status quo.
Those under the age of 35 would get a tax credit for $1,200, those between 35 and 50 would get one for $2,100, those 50 and over would get one for $3,000, and parents would get a $900 tax credit per child. (Those are the amounts that the 2017 Project, Gillespie, Price, and Walker have all called for.) These tax credits would go directly to individuals and families—as any genuine tax credit, or tax cut, must—not to insurance companies. Anyone who shops for value and buys insurance for less than the value of the tax credit could put the savings into a health savings account that he or she would control. The nonpartisan Center for Health and Economy found that such an alternative would save well over $1 trillion over a decade versus Obamacare, while resulting in more people having private health insurance than under Obamacare. That’s right: more people would freely choose to buy insurance under such an alternative than would dutifully buy it when compelled to do so under Obamacare. Liberty would triumph over coercion.
Ryan is now uniquely well-placed to lead the effort to get such an alternative passed into law. Of course, that won’t happen until the Obama era mercifully ends just 14 months from now. But Ryan is now in a position to lead the completion of the climb of which he so passionately spoke—the climb to bring about the full repeal of Obamacare and, in the process, to reclaim the American idea.
Anderson is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.
