Judge Reed O'Connor's ruling on the "A"CA gives us the best opportunity in - well, my lifetime - to put health insurance on a normal-people footing

Braden H. Bousek's PJ Media essay about it is as insightful as you're going to find anywhere.

First, the ruling:

Many Americans checking the news for the first time following the weekend will learn that a federal judge in Texas, in a lawsuit that few were watching, declaredObamacare unconstitutional in its entirety. The question now becomes what happens next, legally and politically.

Judge Reed O’Connor, one of America’s most formidable legal minds, ruled (as predicted) that the individual mandate, originally justified as a tax, could no longer be since the penalty was set at zero. And by the words of Obamacare’s own architects, the individual mandate was essential to the law’s overall success. The whole thing came down along with the mandate.

And now, for some of the dang-I-wish-I'd-said-that insight:

Obamacare was intentionally made clunky and convoluted so as to disguise the true costs from Americans who the law’s author figured were too stupid to recognize the law for what it is – a tax and spend welfare program that would have looked quite at home during the New Deal but for its dishonest packaging.
Employers all across the country who have been hard hit by the "employer mandate" are finding it increasingly difficult to comply. With its hallmark leaden touch, Obamacare forced all large employers across the country and in different industries to provide the health insurance it mandated. As with any closed system, the market suffered.

The rate of the increasing cost of insurance will continue to accelerate as fewer healthy individuals purchase insurance, particularly if only part of the country needs to participate. With people waiting until they need care to buy insurance, the market will be less actuarially sound and the costs will increase further. 

And this insight: The notion that health care - and the means for covering it with insurance - is some kind of overwhelmingly complex web of interconnected factors is a lot of smoke and mirrors:

There’s probably less of a reason why health care isn’t more like the market for phones or cars than people commonly suspect. If you think "health care is just different" from other consumer goods, then check out what’s happened to laser vision eye care over the last decade. Unlike most health care products, it is generally severed from the third party-payer model. With consumers and doctors in charge, laser vision eye care has dramatically gone up in quality and down in cost. In other words, it has behaved unlike other health care products and exactly like a healthy market.

Now, Boucek says, it's time for those in a position to really move the needle to go get 'em:

Many states have incoming governors right now. They have fresh perspective to bring to bear into a debate that had gone stale. In a future when the health insurance market may, for the first time since WWII, not have to orbit around a federal dead star, state lawmakers will be free to innovate like never before. Innovation, consumer choice, and an open market may finally have the opportunity to flourish.

Those states that did not shackle themselves with Medicaid expansion have even greater freedom to experiment. And even those states that remain infatuated with central planning should have the chance to put their schemes into practice. Let us see the results of these competing philosophical models. 

Many thanks to the judge and to the impeccable policy-analysis chops - and ample common sense - of Mr. Boucek.