Since President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act on March 23, 2010, supporters have called the legislation “the law of the land,” and the president says the health care debate is “over.”
But in a new book, one journalist points out that laws can change.
In “Overcoming Obamacare: Three Approaches to Reversing the Government Takeover of Health Care,” released Monday, author Philip Klein argues that the president’s signature law must be repealed. But repeal alone is not enough, Klein says. Opponents of Obamacare must come to agreement on an alternative.
Solely repealing the law still leaves Americans with a “broken health care system,” according to Klein.
Obamacare’s supporters often claim conservatives propose no alternative. The truth, Klein argues, is that so many plans and points of view have been offered from the right that they’ve failed to agree on just one.
“Many of the differences among the competing proposals within the right-of-center health care policy community are [rooted] in a principled disagreement over what the appropriate role is for government in the first place,” writes Klein.
In “Overcoming Obamacare,” Klein conducts an analysis of Obamacare alternatives based on his years covering the health care debate as a reporter for the Washington Examiner.
“[C]ontrary to what Obama likes to argue, the health care debate is not ‘over,’” writes Klein.
Klein says that objections to Obamacare can be separated into three separate schools of thought:
1) The Reform School: made up of people who believe that repealing Obamacare is “unrealistic,” but seek ways to guide the legislation in “a more market-oriented direction.”
2) The Replace School: comprised of people who believe that a full repeal of the law is a “necessity,” but only if an alternative is presented that can make health insurance widely affordable and available.
3) The Restart School: those who believe in fully repealing Obamacare, then using the resulting “clean slate” to allow the free market to bring down costs.
“Not every proposal explored in this book would require a full repeal of the law,” writes Klein. “But all of them, in some way, seek to reverse America’s current trajectory toward a government takeover of health care and instead push the system in a more market-oriented direction.”
Nina Owcharenko, director of the Center for Health Policy Studies at The Heritage Foundation, contributed to the book. She says Klein’s work brings to light new ideas to fix the American health care system:
“Klein does a nice job identifying the alternative approaches to the Affordable Care Act and I believe showcases that these alternatives offer Americans a better health care system than we have today,” Owcharenko tells The Daily Signal.
