Even for the hard cases, we must press on in the search for a pro-freedom solution

Interesting hashing-out of what conservative health-care policy should look like going on over at NRO.    Henry Olsen and Brad Wassink of the American Enterprise Institute have penned a piece announcing a new AEI proposal that, if you carefully parse its gist, still involves gummint subsidies.

Now, I love AEI.  It's been home to some of my favorite thinkers over the years.  But it does employ some folks who get into some too-clever-by-half wonkery.

What I dug was a scrolldown through the comments:

A proposal that finances health coverage for the poor - not the destitute like Medicaid, but the 15-50k poor, and provides some subsidies to middle class, will never pass the Rep House

This is essentially the "public option" - and if the Reps wanted it, they could have had it in a heartbeat

[snip]

Instead of eliminating the employer tax exemption and providing subsidies, why not allow individuals who buy their own policies to take a tax deduction as well?

[snip]

No. No government involvement at all. Especially no government promoted or subsidized insurance. Anything the government provides or subsidized goes up in cost and becomes entangled in red tape.
Health care is a service like any other service. In a free market this service would be available at many different price points and the overall cost would be lower.
Health insurance is only marginally related to health care. It is a means by which a prudent person can plan for emergencies. It has absolutely no business having anything whatsoever to do with routine health care.
Providing health care for the poor who are truly unable to pay for a doctor's services -- as opposed to those who would rather pay for cable TV or a smartphone or drugs or alcohol or ... -- is not a job for the government but, rather, a job for private charity. If any government health care of any kind is to exist at all it should be provided at the local level of the city or the county.

I am hoping that the mini-thread underneath this person's comment will garner further exchange.  It presents us with one of those what-to-do-about-the-hard-cases scenarios, and the discussion must look squarely at them to be worthwhile:

As an acute leukemia and bone-marrow transplant survivor, I received well over one million dollars in treatment. If I were "truly" poor, what charity would have helped me? My local 200 plus member church? The little town in which I live? Should I have just died?

Still, my instincts tell me that any proposal that involves gummint subsidy reveals at least the mild symptoms of Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome.