The tl;dl to this episode is that Avik Roy believes some future hypothetical Republican health-insurance bill will be a significant improvement over the existing health-insurance market. It happens that the actually existing Better Care Reconciliation Act is not that bill, which Roy seems to have no problem conceding. It’s not clear at all from the interview which problems Roy actually thinks the BCRA solves, yet this is the bill about which Roy tweeted

There’s some hypothetical Republican Congress, says Roy, which will care about providing universal coverage for the poor, but it’s not this Republican Congress; there’s some hypothetical humanitarian Republican health-care bill which could hypothetically arise out of the ashes of the BCRA, but the BCRA is not that bill. Roy says we’re supposed to be happy with the BCRA because it’s the result of a debate between the hardcore “throw the poor out in the street” wing of the Republican Party and the “let’s give the poor some health insurance that they can’t afford” wing of the Republican Party. It’s a compromise, and at least they managed to get legislation out the door. The Democratic Party wants, as a core tenet of its platform, to provide health-insurance coverage to everyone, so the result of a Democratic compromise is something that’s at least ideologically coherent: we knew we couldn’t get single payer, and even the public option was too liberal for the likes of Joe Lieberman. It’s not at all clear what the result of this notional Republican compromise is supposed to accomplish.

I believe Roy is a person of conscience, and I take him at his word that he wants good coverage for everyone. Central to his belief system, though, seems to be a cramped view of government that is likely to make it work more poorly and get less public support. Health insurance, he says, is meant to prevent bankruptcy. If you believe that, you’re going to downplay the humdrum day-to-day use of health insurance — e.g., going in for a checkup, or getting a routine dental cleaning; those aren’t the sort of things that threaten people with medical bankruptcy. You’re also going to land, as Roy does, on a spare view of the government’s role in health insurance. The government, he says, should be subsidizing the poor more and the wealthy less. I agree with this, which is why I think it’d just be simpler to provide a service, pay for it with taxes, and make those taxes steeply progressive. Roy takes it in a different direction: if I understand him, he would have the government provide stingy care for catastrophic illnesses only, and only to the poor.

I have major concerns when we think about government like this. Universal programs get universal buy-in: if your wealthy grandfather gets Medicare, he’s going to fight like hell to keep it — even if, by Roy’s lights, he’s too wealthy to need it. In the world Roy envisions, only the poor, who don’t donate to political campaigns and often can’t afford to take time off from work to vote, have an incentive to fight for (Roy’s version of) Medicaid.

The government Roy envisions provides systematically poor service. It’s not just in health insurance; you see Roy-style government also in, say, mass transit. Hence the excellent Matt Yglesias Twitter thread ending here:

Here in the U.S. our mass transit is dirty, overcrowded, and unreliable, at least in part because of an Avik Roy-style ideology that thinks the government should be providing a “safety net”: if every other means of getting to work fails for you, at least you’ve got this one crappy option; if you’re poor, at least you won’t end up too far in debt trying to pay for your health care. So people come to think of government as the provider of crappy services. So they bail on those services and use the expensive private options. So the services become crappier and the cycle continues.

And in many cases what Roy envisions is just too complicated. Roy and Klein go back and forth about premiums, deductibles, cost-sharing, etc., as though we didn’t already have a government which is extremely good at collecting taxes. The Laniel Plan for government is: provide people an excellent service (subways, health care via the VA, health insurance via Medicare), then tax them for it, and make the tax code steeply progressive. (Roy and I would agree that removing the tax deduction for employer-sponsored health care is vital here. Doing so would be both good for the overall health system and very progressive.) No deductibles. No copays.

Scale out just the tiniest bit. The goal should be that the insurance you get via the government — whether it’s Medicare or Medicaid or the VA or the ACA exchanges — is as good as the best employer-provided health insurance. Why are we always settling for a “safety net”? We’re a wealthy country. We can afford to provide stellar coverage to everyone. Not only can we afford to provide excellent services; our habit of not providing them has led us to the state we’re in, where government services are near-universally perceived as … well, as the government cheese of whatever service they’re supposed to provide. We’re in a self-fulfilling vicious cycle now, where government services are perceived as poor, which makes cutting their funding politically easier, which leads to poor government services. I’d like to see us reverse that into a virtuous cycle.

It seems clear that Roy would disagree with all of this, and that Democrats would agree with most of it. To the extent that our laws look muddled — as, arguably, Obamacare did — it’s because we know that the thing we actually want (single-payer, basically) is not feasible, so we unfortunately compromise into something muddled. Whereas it’s not clear what Roy wants; and to the extent that it is clear what he wants, what he wants is something that would make the government work even less well. What’s truly terrifying is that Roy is the moderate in his party.