The Healthcare Alternative: Government Planning vs. Individual Planning

In an op-ed titled Why Obamacare will survive, the New Jersey Star-Ledger's Tom Moran highlighted the GOP establishment's healthcare Achilles heal:

    To watch the evolution of the Republican Party on this issue has been nothing but sad. There was a day when GOP leaders agreed that all Americans should have coverage, as in every other advanced nation on Earth. The argument was about how to achieve that goal. Progressive Democrats wanted a single-payer system based on Canada’s.
    Republicans instead gave us Romneycare in Massachusetts, and Obama embraced that model as a compromise.

It's still true that most Republicans accept the premise that "all Americans should have coverage," and that the government should ensure that they do. This fact makes Republican opposition to ObamaCare hollow, and has led to a false premise being accepted by Americans; that the argument is over how, not whether, government should achieve the goal of universal coverage. The Republicans' fundamental contradiction has been exploited relentlessly by the Left, as Moran does in his concluding remarks:

[The Republicans] have no plausible plan to achieve universal coverage, or anything near it. They have no credible plan B. And in the end, that fact could doom their efforts to repeal Obamacare.

I left these comments:

Moran falsely frames the debate as a choice between socialized medicine GOP style and socialized medicine Democrat style. But the real alternatives are government planning of everyone's healthcare with taxpayer money, or each individual planning his own healthcare with his own money; between a government of aggression and a government that protects individual rights; between self-responsibility and parasitism; between immoral healthcare and moral healthcare.

There is and always has been a real alternative to both ObamaCare and the deteriorating pre-ObamaCare status quo: a free market. A free market does not guarantee that everyone will have what they consider satisfactory healthcare or health insurance. Any government that attempts to realize such a guarantee will have to resort to looting, slavery, and worse totalitarian measures. What a free market does guarantee is that the government will protect each person's right to his property and the liberty to act on his own judgement in pursuit of his healthcare and other values. Contrary to Moran, there are GOP alternatives out there. One is "PatientCare"—a good move toward a free market.

Related Reading:

No Free Market Health Reform Will "Work"—by Socialist Standards

THE OBAMACARE ALTERNATIVE OBAMA DOESN’T WANT YOU TO KNOW ABOUT—Rituparna Basu

'I Don't Know': The Ideal Libertarian And Conservative Response To Obamacare's Failings—by John Tamny for Forbes