YUVAL LEVIN: Replacing ObamaCare.

Two thoughts of my own.

Yglesias's understing of 'risk pools' is sadly mistaken. The risk pool is not the employer, and not even the insurance company (although Levin is much more nearly correct): it is the totality of all the insurance company's insurees, averaged over some extended period of time to build up reserves against catastrophic, but unlikely, events. Because Yglesias is fixated on health care and not health insurance, he conflates an insurance risk pool with a 'prepayment pool' for routine, but entirely predictable expenses.

With respect to 'cheap, renewable catastrophic policies', Yglesias again misses the point entirely. Cheap, renewable catastrophic policies are not 'low-quality health care'; it's high-quality health insurance for unlikely but potentially catastrophic events. Like automobile and homeowner's insurance, with catastrophic health insurance I pay a small premium each month in the fond hope that eventually I die having 'wasted' all those premiums by not requiring the services they cover.

To use Yglesias's affordable housing policy analogy, I'd rather live temporarily in a tent in the park while my house is being rebuilt than live permanently in Yglesias's government-owned housing project.