Why the Public Plan Is a Fundamentally Conservative Idea

I've been trying to figure out how to make this sound like more than a cute argument, because I think it's actually a point my conservative friends should seriously consider.

In general, there are two ways for firms to adopt an idea. The government solution -- the socialist solution -- is to impose it on them by legislative fiat. An example would be Congress passing a law that makes selling New Coke illegal. The other path is through market competition. Plummeting revenue and rising market share for Pepsi convince the Coca Cola company that selling New Coke is a bad plan and they should cut it out.

It is perhaps evidence of the triumph of market-based ideas that the public plan falls pretty decisively on the right edge of that spectrum. The idea here is that the public plan will adopt effective reforms that will then lower its costs and improve its quality. In response, the private market will follow suit.

But this deal won't be around forever. The public plan is an effort to institute reforms through a market mechanism. But if it fails, and the health industry doesn't manage to bend the cost curve on its own, it's fairly likely that it will end up on the business end of some serious new regulations. And at the point that costs become a crisis, those regulations will need to work fast. That means they'll be implemented in the government's way, not the market's way.