LAUSR

This article advocates for a regulated private monopoly as an audacious solution to replace Obamacare, help manage Medicare and Medicaid and reform the US healthcare insurance industry. Contemporary economics vilifies monopolies and praises the ‘magic wand’ of perfect competition without much debate on the merits of these assumptions. The problems with the perfect competition model as applied to healthcare insurance are well established, but exploration of other possible economic models (i.e. monopoly and oligopoly) as a replacement for Obamacare is non-existent. New thinking about the role of monopolies may help achieve public policy goals and make health insurance available to the largest number of people at a reasonable premium while containing medical costs.