President Obama promised that the brunt of any financial reckoning will fall mostly only on those making more than $250,000 annually. Under his healthcare plan, the economic agony starts at income levels that fall much lower than that.

The problem of coverage for pre-existing conditions remains relatively small and limited to the individual health insurance market, despite exaggerated claims used to advance passage of the Affordable Care Act. Nevertheless, too many people still remained at risk of falling through the cracks of protective measures provided by HIPAA, COBRA, and state-run high risk pools.

Which politicians do you trust more to micromanage your health care: federal or state? That’s the false choice presented by two versions of “federalism” intended to divide responsibility for health policy between the national government and the states.

For all the talk about the Affordable Care Act's mandate to purchase insurance, you might think that the mandate is the linchpin of the entire law. It isn't, at least from the standpoint of whether the insurance market will collapse without it. 

Whether or not the individual mandate in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) proves to be constitutionally valid, it is based on mistaken premises, faulty economic analysis, short-sighted politics, and seriously flawed health policy.

If the individual mandate is upheld, Americans will have suffered a loss of liberty from which there will be no turning back.

The dirty little secret of American healthcare is that the mandate wouldn’t save taxpayers a dime. Why? Because the tax subsidies for people with health insurance are bigger than the unpaid medical bills left behind by the uninsured.

Tom Miller's speech at the Pioneer Institute's health care policy luncheon and The Great Experiment book launch on March 13, 2012.