Move on, Conservatives!

You were right to fight Obamacare, right to fight legal challenges, right to fight state exchanges. Now move on, conservatives, and turn your intellectual energy to fixing the national health care mess, including Obamacare. That's essentially the message Avik Roy argues here and here. He suggests that once conservatives get over their grief, "they may realize Obamacare presents them with a counter-intuitive opportunity."

Drawing upon Switzerland's model — which uses health insurance exchanges and has NO government-run public option — Roy outlines a four-step plan.

1. Leverage Obamacare's state government-run exchanges into market-oriented exchanges (with no government option) and repeal O'Care's "community rating" provisions so young people can afford insurance.
2. Migrate Medicare enrollees (government's seniors plan) into exchanges and offer premium support (somewhat like the Paul Ryan plan).
3. Accept that many employers will move away from providing insurance, so enable more people to buy insurance on their own via free-market exchanges.
4. Move patients of Medicaid (government's welfare plan) — "America's worst health care program" — into exchanges to eliminate the disincentive they currently have to avoid work (for fear of losing Medicaid) and to ease the financial burden O'Care puts on states.

Read the whole argument. It's worth the intellectual energy.