As the new Congress gets down to business, the issue of health care will once again be at the top of the agenda — which is good news for conservatives. No issue is riper for the strategy of dismantling regulation and letting the free market do its work. The problem is, no one much thinks this way. The Republicans may have beaten back socialized medicine for now, but the game is still being played on the Left’s turf. Last year’s Kassebaum- Kennedy Act, for example, imposed new mandates of the kind that has made health insurance so expensive at the state level. Mandated benefits force consumers to buy things they do not want, which, at the margin, is what makes insurance too expensive for many to buy.

And this remains at the core of the health-insurance crisis. More than 41 million people are still without coverage — up from 36 million in 1994 — at a time when a single hospital visit can bankrupt a family. Who are they? They are not the poor, who are covered by Medicaid, but rather people either self- employed or working for small businesses. Of those employed by businesses with 10 employees or fewer, a full 75 percent are without coverage.