Health plans have become far more expensive than they need to be because they're required to cover a wide array of services, many of which don't need to be paid for via an insurance plan. We don't use insurance to pay for routine expenses in any other area of life. Take car insurance: We don't use it for oil changes or tune-ups.

Some will say that health insurance is different. "You can get a new car; you can't get a new body!" they say. But this is beside the point. Health insurance doesn't keep you healthy any more than car insurance keeps your wheels on the road. The point is that insurance, no matter the type, is meant to protect you financially. People buy it because they are mitigating risk. Higher risk customers should expect to pay more, while lower risk customers can pay less. Otherwise it's not a good deal for them.

We've stopped treating health insurance this way, and that's part of our problem. To make insurance what it's supposed to be, we have to repeal Obamacare's rules about "essential health benefits" (the mandates that require routine care to be covered for everyone) and restore risk-based pricing. Furthermore,other  plans encourage the use of tax-free health savings accounts for healthcare costs paid outside of insurance channels.

This will surely be disparaged as the undoing of "consumer protections" that make insurance so robust, but the ultimate consumer protection is market competition. Today, too many Americans lack choices. In 40 percent of counties, Obamacare exchanges customers have only one insurer available. How's that for competition?

But most Americans aren't in the exchanges. Most privately insured Americans don't choose their insurance at all. Their boss chooses for them, because most people get insurance through their employer, and for good reason. Since the World War II era, Americans who get health insurance through their jobs have enjoyed a tax exclusion on those benefits. This gives the greatest advantage to high-income people, and leaves those without employer-based insurance out in the cold.