(Bloomberg View) — Republicans dislike Obamacare: The party is unified on that issue. But they don't all dislike it for the same reasons, and their disagreements help explain their continued inability to figure out how to respond to a Supreme Court decision on the law that's expected by the end of June.
Many of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act's opponents, like many of its supporters, identify the law's core feature as the use of federal subsidies to help millions of people who had lacked health insurance to get it. They think the proposed Republican alternatives– which also involve offering subsidies to help people buy insurance — look awfully similar to this arrangement. "Obamacare lite" is their preferred disparagement.
But an alternative view is that while the federal government over-subsidizes the consumption of health care — and has for decades – increasing subsidies was not the main way that PPACA expanded government involvement in health care. Rather, its key innovation was to make the health care system further centralized, regulated and coercive.
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