Barack Obama isn't promising health care with universal coverage, just a close approximation of it, but it's not for any lack of taxes and regulations in his plan

National Review, June 25, 2007

Barack Obama isn't promising health care with universal coverage, just a close approximation of it, but it's not for any lack of taxes and regulations in his plan. Along with a lot of Democrats, he claims that he can pay for part of the plan by making drug companies sell medicine to Medicare on the cheap.

The Congressional Budget Office finds, however, that no savings will materialize unless senior citizens' choice of medicines is restricted, which is something Obama is unwilling to advocate publicly. His plan builds on employer-provided health care. Companies that don't offer insurance would have to start offering it, or pay a tax. But we ought to be moving away from employer provision to a market model of health care. Employers should scrap their health benefits and give their employees raises instead, so that they can buy their own insurance; and federal policies that keep such arrangements from being made should be eliminated. The employer-based system is the reason for most of the problems that health-care reform is supposed to solve. What's wrong with Obama's plan is that it's not radical enough.