http://www.nationalreview.com/node/419752/print Why Conservatives Should Help People Get Health Insurance
By Ramesh Ponnuru — June 15, 2015
Just how important is it that everybody in the United States be able to get health insurance? Conservatives are ambivalent, at best, about that goal. Many of them think that it is more important to restrain the growth of health-care costs; many of them worry that putting insurance within reach for everyone would involve excessive government power. They are right to be concerned about costs and about big government. They should nevertheless overcome their ambivalence. There are good reasons to embrace a conservative health-care policy that enables coverage for all Americans who seek it — not the least being that in the present political context, that policy might be the best way to restrain both costs and government.
There are certainly grounds for skepticism about the intense emphasis that the Obama-era Democrats have put on coverage expansion. A recent study of Medicaid recipients in Oregon — the best study of its kind — was unable to find any significant differences between their physical health and that of uninsured people. (Other research has yielded more-positive findings.) There’s also a hard-headed political case for a different focus: Cost control has more to offer most voters than coverage expansion does, since most voters have health insurance and did before Obamacare.
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