You should go read Uwe Reinhardt. That’s true 100% of the time, but it’s especially true here. Reinhardt writes about “conservative” health reform, where “conservative” somehow means “involving a great deal of intrusion into everyone’s life.” Remember how one of the big problems with HealthCare.gov is that it’s required to connect to so many other systems to confirm details of the beneficiary’s life? It needs to confirm that you’re not in the U.S. illegally; needs to confirm that your income is low enough to qualify for subsidies; needs to connect to private insurers’ websites; etc. How is that conservative? It’s likely to make an already inefficient system even less efficient.

Why is this so hard? I don’t need to sign up for bronze, silver, and gold national defense. I pay my taxes, and I get a service in response. Let’s just expand Medicare to everyone and call it a day. Or extend the VA hospital system to everyone and call it a day. Inasmuch as ‘conservative’ should mean ‘delivering a given level of service as cheaply efficiently as possible’, those approaches would be highly conservative. Instead we get systems that are more and more jerry-rigged over time, with more and more obvious flaws. Enough already.