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All these plans aim to change federal tax, spending and regulatory policy to enable almost everyone to get insurance that covers, at a minimum, catastrophic health expenses. People who don't have access to employer-provided plans would receive a tax credit that they could use to buy coverage -- and that coverage would no longer have to comply with all the mandates in President Barack Obama's Affordable Care Act. In Bush's version of the plan, older people would get a larger credit. The tax break for employer-provided coverage, meanwhile, would be capped, both to keep the tax code from rewarding the most expensive plans and to raise some of the money needed for the credits.

People with pre-existing conditions would be protected by a regulation that requires insurers to offer coverage on the same terms to sick people and healthy people, so long as they had maintained coverage. That proviso is there to keep people from waiting until they're sick to get insurance. Meeting that condition would be easier than it has been in the past, thanks to the tax credit.

Bush would also reform federal aid to state health-care programs for poor people, to give them much more flexibility. States could, for example, pass along much of their funding to the recipients so that they could purchase private coverage.

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