The Galen Institute's Grace-Marie Turner, writing in the Wall Street Journal, finds "disturbing" a McKinsey study finding that ObamaCare will cause employers to drop their employer-sponsored health coverage.
But what's "disturbing" about moving health-care purchase decisions to individuals rather than employers? They are only with employers to begin with as a relic of FDR-era wage-price controls. If you want consumer-driven health care that will eventually reward quality and value and curb inflation, you've got to make the costs more transparent to consumers, and taking the employer out of the equation as a third-party payer does that.
Granted, there are problems if the employer is just going to be replaced by the government as the payer. But even if the individual payer gets a subsidy, at least the cost of the subsidy then becomes more visible than the current hidden subsidy in the preferential tax treatment for employer-provided health care.
And granted, too, there are political problems, since President Obama sold his plan on the basis of, if you like your current plan, you can keep it.
But conservatives and free market types should think twice before piling on to bemoan the decline of employer-sponsored health coverage.