Josh Barro, Columnist

There Is Still No Republican Health Policy Agenda

If there is such a thing as a Republican plan to fix health policy, why won't Republicans vote for it?

April 25, 2013 at 5:29 PM UTC

Josh Barro is the lead writer for the Ticker, Bloomberg View's blog on economics, finance and politics. His primary areas of interest include tax and fiscal policy, state and local government, and planning and land use. Previously, Barro was a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and a commercial real estate banker at Wells Fargo. He holds a bachelor's degree in psychology from Harvard and lives in Queens, New York.

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There's no surer way to make a conservative health wonk huffy than by saying Republicans don't have a health policy agenda. They insist they do, and an important part of it is high-risk pools: government entities that provide subsidized insurance to people with health risks who couldn't be covered affordably in private markets.

Heartland Institute research fellow (and sometime Malaysia blogger) Ben Domenech says, "Of all the absurd memes repeated by the policy-bereft media these days, the idea that Republicans have no plan to replace Obamacare is one of the most irritatingly false." One crucial plank of the replacement that Domenech identifies is "to support state-level pre-existing condition pools."