Conservative revolutionaries on health care?

I've done a fair amount of reading on the history of our American health care system, and Ponnuru's summary gets at the basic points pretty well. In the postwar period, the industrialized countries faced a choice over who would pay for health care, the individual (as we do with most insurance, such as for homes and cars) or the government (as we do for things like floods and other natural disasters). Most of the world chose "government" and ended up with universal, single-payer, government-run health care. But instead of going with "individuals," we went with "option C," employers, through a system of tax breaks. 50 years later, and that compromise is unraveling, so now we appear to be heading back to the "government or individuals" choice. What's interesting to me is that the Democrats are actually the "statist" group looking to continue most of the existing system with some drift toward the "government" answer. And it's the Republicans who have pretty much concluded that the existing system has to be scrapped completely and replaced with one that focuses on the individual. They have become on this issue, as with Social Security and many other government policies, "white revolutionaries" proposing radical change.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1682269,00.html