I admit to a love-hate relationship with the subject of healthcare reform. I used to wave around the words Universal Healthcare quite a bit, and with good reason. Going uninsured in this country is a recipe for disaster, and there are indeed people who fall between the cracks in the healthcare status quo. Typically these are people who are either just a little too old to get good private insurance, or who are just a little too well-to-do to qualify for Medicaid - but still too poor to afford insurance in our vastly skewed, un-free system. This is especially true of the self-employed, a segment of the population that is essential to an evolving American economy but which faces some serious disadvantages in the healthcare market.

Anyways, Universal Healthcare seemed like a good idea, and it still does, but I've put a lot more thought into how to achieve broader access to healthcare and once you start doing that the inevitable questions arise: how to foot the bill - and not just the bill this year or next year, but the bill for the next hundred years. The next two hundred years. How do you increase access to healthcare and still maintain a sustainable bottom line?

Well, not with the new healthcare law, as Avik Roy nimbly points out in his point-by-point takedown of the DNC's pro-Obamacare talking points. Rather than a heavily regulated, heavily subsidized corporatist healthcare reform bill that takes many of the worst aspects of the status quo and entrenches them further, what American healthcare needs is free market reforms that put more choice into consumers' hands while lowering government involvement in the industry across the board.

Government can still be a part of the solution - indeed, government will need to be a part of the solution, if only to repeal decades of bad healthcare legislation. I've said before, single-payer would be preferable to the mess we've got (and to the new law as well). But market reforms could also work.

Low-income insurance vouchers or catastrophic insurance vouchers could empower low-income Americans to purchase their insurance on the market. Meanwhile, forcing insurers to compete across state lines - and reforming the insurance regulations to apply to the state of the insurance carrier rather than insurer - could drive competition and lower cost across the board.