Over nearly a century, progressives have pressed for a national, single-payer healthcare system. When it comes to health reform, what have conservatives stood for?

For far too long, conservatives have failed to coalesce around a long-term vision of what a free-market healthcare system should look like. Republican attention to healthcare, in turn, has only arisen sporadically, in response to Democratic initiatives.

Obamacare is the logical byproduct of this conservative policy neglect. President Barack Obama’s re-election was a strategic victory for his signature healthcare law. Once the bulk of the program begins to be implemented in 2014 — especially its trillions of dollars in new health-insurance subsidies — it will become politically impossible to repeal. And as the baby boomers retire and Obamacare is fully operational, government health spending will reach unsustainable levels.

The great irony of Obama’s triumph, however, is that it can pave the way for Republicans to adopt a comprehensive, market-oriented healthcare agenda. The market-oriented prescription drug program in Medicare has controlled the growth of government health spending. Similarly, conservatives can use Obamacare’s important concession to the private sector — its establishment of subsidized insurance marketplaces — as a vehicle for broader entitlement reforms.

While most Americans view their healthcare system as “free-market,” Switzerland actually has the most market-oriented healthcare system in the West. It translates into universal coverage and low entitlement costs. Swiss government entities spent about 3.5 percent of gross domestic product on healthcare in 2010, compared to 8.5 percent in the United States. That’s a difference of more than $5 trillion over 10 years: real money, especially relative to our $16 trillion debt.

There is no “public option” in Switzerland. Instead, citizens qualify for means-tested, sliding-scale subsidies and choose among a variety of regulated, private-sector insurance products. The Swiss have the freedom to choose their own doctors, as Americans do, and access to the latest medical technologies. They also have short waiting times for appointments.

Both Representative Paul Ryan’s “premium support” proposal for Medicare and Obamacare’s exchanges are modeled on the Swiss system. If premium support is a dastardly right-wing plot, despite its origins in Democratic circles, applying Obamacare’s exchanges to Medicare is even more so. After all, Obamacare’s subsidies only apply to those with incomes below four times the federal poverty level: $60,520 for a family of two. By contrast, Medicare subsidies apply to every American over age 65.

Shifting Medicare to the exchanges would save trillions of taxpayer dollars in future entitlement spending. After all, why should middle-class taxpayers be forced to pay for Warren Buffett’s health insurance?

There is, indeed, a way to use health-insurance exchanges to both reform our healthcare entitlements and reduce premiums for those with private insurance. This transition could take four steps.

The first is to replace or reform Obamacare’s exchanges, which are larded with costly mandates and regulations. These drive up the price of insurance, while limiting insurers’ ability to come up with more innovative, cost-efficient products.

“Community rating,” for example, will dramatically increase premiums for young people, a counterproductive approach when one considers that most uninsured Americans are in their 20s and 30s. States should build free-market exchanges with affordable health plans — as Utah has done — and demonstrate their superiority to Obamacare’s costlier approach.

Second, Republicans in Congress should put the size, scale and growth of Obamacare’s insurance subsidies on the table in all current and future budget talks. The subsidies should end at 300 percent of the federal poverty level, as they do in Massachusetts, instead of 400 percent. And they should not grow at a faster rate than the economy, as they are now designed to do.

Third, we should use the insurance exchanges in the service of Medicare reform. Instead of bothering with complex legislation, Congress should raise the eligibility age for traditional Medicare by three months each year — for the foreseeable future. Retirees will then gradually migrate into the exchanges’ premium-support systems.

Medicaid-eligible seniors should also be offered exchange-based coverage, to improve the quality and coordination of their care.

Fourth is to gradually shift the remainder of Medicaid’s low-income enrollees into the exchanges. Today, Medicaid recipients face a strong disincentive to seek work, because entry-level jobs can force them to give up their health coverage in exchange for modestly higher income. The exchanges would allow these workers to climb up the income ladder while maintaining their insurance.

The end result would be a fiscally sustainable, fully reformed set of entitlement and insurance programs that place American families in charge of their own health dollars. In other words, everything that conservatives have always wanted. And we’d have Obama, in part, to thank.

EDITORS’ NOTE: This piece provoked a wide-ranging web discussion, including arguments from The New York Times’ Paul Krugman on his The Conscience of a Liberal blog, Andrew Sullivan in The Dish, Josh Barro for Bloomberg View’s The Ticker, Matt Yglesias on Slate’s Moneybox, Aaron Carroll on The Washington Monthly and Walter Russel Mead on his Via Media blog,

Holtz-Eakin and Roy wrote an extensive response to these rebuttals and you can find it here.

PHOTO (Top): Medical supplies in a pediatrician’s office in Encinitas, California July 30, 2009. REUTERS/Mike Blake

PHOTO (Insert): Representative Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) during a hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington June 1, 2012. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque