Josh Barro, Columnist

Obamacare `Repeal and Replace' Still Light on `Replace'

When someone tells you a health-care policy is terrible, the most important question is âcompared with what"?

April 3, 2013 at 9:43 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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Yuval Levin and Bloomberg View columnist Ramesh Ponnuru argue in the cover story of the current National Review that "repeal and replace" should remain the conservative mantra on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The law is so unworkable, they say, that it can't be molded into something workable; conservatives must focus on outright replacement. This puts Levin and Ponnuru in opposition with conservative think-tankers such as Tevi Troy and Paul Howard, who are now arguing for a political strategy of reforming the law.

When someone tells you a health-care policy is terrible, the most important question is "compared with what"? And so it's disappointing that Levin and Ponnuru devoted just three paragraphs of their 3,100-word piece to discussing how a replacement for the Affordable Care Act might look. They provide too little detail to convince the reader that their plan for "replace" would be less horrible than the parade of horribles they spend much of the piece arguing are reasons for repeal.