With the Iowa caucuses 48 hours away, poor Ted Cruz just can’t catch a break. His debate performance was lame, his campaign got caught playing Big Brother with voters, and now he – rather than any of his competitors – had to field the killer question on Obamacare.

An Iowa voter confronted him at a town hall and told  the story of the voter’s wife’s brother,  a hard-working self-employed barber who couldn’t afford health insurance until the ACA came along. Then he felt sick, went in for a check-up, and was diagnosed with inoperable late-stage cancer. The voter’s question was straightforward: if you repeal Obamacare, what replaces it for people like my wife’s brother? (Left unspoken: if ACA had passed earlier, the brother-in-law might have lived.)

Cruz expressed ritual sympathy and immediately pivoted to his health-care talking points. The voter pressed for a real answer, but Cruz didn’t have one for him, just as none of his competitors would have had one. No Republican has proposed any actual substitute for the ACA formula of affordable health insurance for everyone who wants it.

Now, there’s an honest conservative/libertarian answer to that voter’s question; I’ve heard it from friends on that side of  the aisle. It goes more or less like this: Continue Reading…