In 1996, Dr. Ben Carson, now a conservative favorite and potential presidential candidate, wrote a paper outlining his vision for U.S. health care.

Some of his proposals: nationalized catastrophic care, essentially replacing Medicaid with health care food stamps, and "national guidelines" about when the elderly and terminally ill should receive care.

By implementing government-run catastrophic health care, Carson argued, the price of premiums would go down so much that employer-based health care would come to an end and people would own their own health care policies. In fact, Carson wrote, Medicare would also no longer be necessary.

In recent years, Carson has been a vociferous critic of the Affordable Care Act. His current-day proposals for health care involve giving a $2,000 stipend to each American to set up Health Savings Accounts — and little else from the government, he told Politico last year.

Nearly two decades ago, though, in the essay published by the Harvard Journal of Minority Public Health, Carson uses the food-stamp program and some disaster relief programs as models for improving U.S. health care and, in some cases, the means for dramatically reducing its costs.

Carson writes of using computers to improve national records, making the track record of physicians accessible and transparent, and requiring insurers to provide coverage despite pre-existing conditions. But the centerpiece of Carson's plan is government-run health care for catastrophic events.

"It has been generally been assumed that we wish to avoid a single-payer health care system," wrote Carson. "Yet there are some well-defined programs that the federal government has handled reasonably well, such as the Disaster Relief Program."

Carson describes how catastrophic health care events account for the biggest costs to insurers — and therefore, the reason for skyrocketing premiums as medical advances in the second half of the 20th century allowed Americans to live much longer. He cites the "massive aid" the government provides to citizens after disasters as a strong model.

"The next question is, who will pay for catastrophic care? The answer: the government-run catastrophic health-fund. Such a fund would be supported by a mandatory contribution of approximately 10 to 15 percent of profits of each health insurance company, including managed care operations."

The essay also features a particularly sharp passage about how Americans view health care for the elderly and very ill.

"Unlike many other advanced nations," Carson wrote, "American society has not yet come to terms with the fact that it is not unreasonable to keep simply someone comfortable at home when catastrophic illness occurs rather than putting them in an intensive care unit, poking and prodding them, operating and testing them ad nauseam, why not allow them the dignity of dying in comfort, at home, with an attendant if necessary?"

One solution, Carson wrote, would be to establish "national guidelines" for care, noting at one point in the essay that if the government provided for catastrophic care, it "would facilitate a national debate on what catastrophic conditions should be treated and to what extent."

"Decisions on who should be treated and who should not be treated clearly requires some national guidelines and obviously should be made based on the viability of the patient rather than the age of the patient," he wrote. "There are clearly many 90-year-old individuals who are healthier than some 40 or 50-year-old individuals and certainly medical treatment should not be withheld if there is a reasonable chance of recovery and resumption of a normal lifestyle."

These national guidelines are not the only federal standards for care that Carson proposes.

Earlier in the essay, Carson proposes as a malpractice reform, that "a law could simply be passed stating that a physician who is adhering to the national guidelines for the treatment of a certain diagnosis could not be sued even if the results of the treatment were not optimal."

To take care of the very poor, Carson proposed a system of "health stamps" explicitly modeled after the food-stamp program.

"Instead of giving medical assistance cards to the poor, they could be issued the equivalent of health stamps," he wrote. "These would be credit vouchers (which could be in the form of electronic money) that could be used to purchase medical services in the same way that food stamps are used to purchase food items."

Carson's current rhetoric and proposals stand in sharp contrast to those outlined in his article.

Last year, he told Politico that in his current proposal for health care reform, "[t]he only responsibility of the government would be providing $2,000 per year for every American citizen ... to provide everyone with a health savings account" — a role that falls far short of his earlier suggestion that the government take over catastrophic coverage from private insurers.

In the same interview, he also criticized government-assistance programs.

"We take the downtrodden in our society and we pat them on the head," Carson said to Politico. "We say 'There, there, you poor little thing. I'm gonna give you free health care. I'm gonna give you housing. I'm gonna give you food stamps. You don't have to worry about anything."

In a statement to BuzzFeed News, Terry Giles, a Carson confidant who will chair his campaign if he runs, said the essay was evidence that Carson is a deep-thinker about U.S. health care — and that the positions were from long ago.

"The Harvard Journal article from two decades ago is proof that Dr. Carson has for a very long time been thinking about how health care could be delivered to all Americans. This is not an issue he has only recently thought about but a plan that has matured and been more perfected by him over many years. His beginning view 19 years ago on health care for all Americans is as relevant to his view today, as our current military action in Afghanistan is compared to our military strategy in Afghanistan two decades ago."