How The Right Could Improve Health Reform In The Future

Noah Millman is hammering together a policy platform (here are parts one, two, three, four, five, and six). From the second post:

My own inclination is to say that Obama’s health-care proposal is a step in the right direction, the kind of reform that would make it easier for a subsequent Republican administration to reform it in a direction that will be more open to the kinds of price signals that drive medical innovation and, in turn, actually lower costs. Such reforms are essentially impossible until a functional individual insurance market is created, and the Obama health-care plan, if it works, promises to create such a market. That’s a big “if” – but if it doesn’t create a functional individual insurance market, then it will fail, and the citizenry, rather than demanding repeal, will demand that it be changed to make that market work.

That's my view as well. If I were starting over from scratch, I wouldn't end up where we are or will be.

But we're not starting from scratch, and finding a way to get universal coverage as a moral necessity, while including potentially big cost-control measures and individual insurance markets, is good enough for me right now.

Market-oriented conservatives should, in my view, propose to amend the law in future to expand those things they favor - tort reform - and include new measures, like more price signals for consumers in healthcare. There's a lot in this bill that conservatives could work on; instead they have sought to kill it and then repeal it.

At some point, they'll grow up, and realize politics is not a game to be "won" but a process to be engaged.