• Goldy | The Stranger
• Any moment now, a young woman will burst into the room and fling a hammer at the screen.

It's state attorney general Rob McKenna's turn to address the crowd at the State of Reform conference in Seatac, and he's doing it via a really crappy Skype connection. I can pretty much make out every other word, and the occasional screen freezes make McKenna look even less life-like than usual. The large screen, the dim lights, and the numb, unexpressive look on the faces in the audience, remind me of Apple's famous "1984" commercial. Any moment now, I expect a young woman to burst into the room and fling a hammer at the screen, smashing it into a million pieces.

From what I can tell, McKenna's argument is that the Affordable Care Act amounts to "price controls," which he says never work. Instead, he wants to free up competition and let the Geico gecko sell us health insurance. The free market cures all, I guess. The invisible hand of God, and all that.

I'm hearing a lot of criticism (or at least, every other word of it) of our current health care system, and those ACA reforms McKenna's asking the Supreme Court to toss out. But what I'm not hearing are a lot of policy specifics about what McKenna would do instead.

"We have to ask ourselves hard questions, as a society, about what we can afford and what we cannot afford," says McKenna. True enough. But God forbid McKenna should offer his own list.

UPDATE: In response to a question from the audience, McKenna once again insisted that "the Affordable Care Act is not going to be overturned"... even though that's exactly what his lawsuit is asking the Supreme Court to do. Instead, McKenna says, the individual mandate will be tossed out.

As for how the rest of the provisions would work without the individual mandate, McKenna admits that we'll have to provide "incentives" for people to purchase health insurance, but he doesn't off any alternatives.