From my new Bloomberg column:

While the federal government over-subsidizes the consumption of health care — and has for decades – increasing subsidies was not the main way that Obamacare expanded government involvement in health care. Rather, its key innovation was to make the health-care system further centralized, regulated and coercive.
On this view, the law’s most objectionable aspect isn’t the tax credits. The real problem is that Obamacare makes the federal government the primary regulator of health insurance, uses that regulatory power to strictly define coverage in ways that restrict options and competition, attempts to force people to buy insurance products they don’t want, creates a federal board of dubious constitutionality to set standards, and assumes that empowering experts in Washington is the best way to make health care more efficient and rational. The tax credits in Obamacare are objectionable mainly insofar as they further this highly prescriptive scheme.