It is curious that conservatives have spent so much energy trying to destroy their wet dream of a marketplace for insurance companies.

Obamacare was a conservative invention. It did not come out of the left, progressive, or even neo-liberal thought process.

Obamacare began life with the conservative Heritage Foundation:

https://www.heritage.org/health-care-reform/report/national-health-system-america

The mandate, which was part of the original conservative proposal and first saw implementation in Massachusetts as part of Romneycare, is on page 46 of the PDF document outlining the free market plan that was designed to stave off the kind of national health care plan Richard Nixon proposed in the 1970s and that conservatives have fought against since then.

Both that document and the documents that helped formulate Romneycare emphasized that without the mandate, the plans were unworkable. In the words of Blue Cross/Blue Shield:

Full coverage “is only achievable if health insurance is made mandatory in the state.” (https://bluecrossmafoundation.org/sites/default/files/051007RTCSynthesisHolahan.pdf)

The Heritage Foundation said the same thing regarding a national plan. Why? Because premiums will soar otherwise. Guess what? They have. Mostly as a result of the about face conservatives did after Obama introduced the plan in 2009, and their persistent attacks against the very mandates THEY invented.

I think we all know that if McCain had won the election and proposed a McCainCare based on Romneycare, we wouldn't be having these kinds of discussions.

I for one will be happy to see ACA crumble. Premiums for any kind of reasonable health care are unaffordable thanks to the persistent attacks conservatives have made against the plan they created.

And frankly, it was a bad idea in the first place. Healthcare and capitalism are a lousy marriage.

Still, it is weird that conservatives turned against a plan that took them 20 years or so to create. It really was the perfect free market plan. An online, Amazon style place where people could - and HAD TO - do business with insurance companies.

No wonder insurance companies loved it. They had a captive market.

Conservatives have had enough time to tinker with the broken system of free market healthcare.

That time has now expired. Be careful what you wish for with the Supreme Court, because ending the conservative-created plan will leave only one choice for policymakers.

Ironically, as America adopts a national healthcare system of some kind, conservatives will only have themselves to blame. They destroyed their own toy.

Free market healthcare has been around since the 1930s. Conservatives have been trying to make it work for that long and failed.

Meanwhile, the rest of the civilized world has adopted some form or another of nationalized healthcare, and they've made it work. Some more successfully than others.

Conservatives won't be able to come up with an alternative plan because there isn't one.

The final result of the end of Obamacare will be nationalized healthcare. There is nothing left.

The nonsense of "actuarially sound prices" is just more free market blather regarding a system that has been broken for almost 100 years.

The days of tinkering are over. A national health plan is coming, like it or not.