Cato‘s Healthy Competition newsletter summarizes its recent blog posts on health care:

• In “Newt Tries to Out-Romney Romney, Endorses ‘Public Option’ in Medicare,” Cannon observes that former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R) opposes a “public option” in ObamaCare, but supports one in Medicare.
• In “A Life of One’s Own,” Trevor Burrus writes, “ObamaCare’s individual mandate…overrides individual value preferences and substitutes other values through force. In other words, the government is telling you that your value preferences are wrong.”
• In “Romney: Individual Mandate = ‘What I Believe Is Right’,” Cannon comments on Mitt Romney’s address on health care noting that “his defense of his individual mandate was indistinguishable from those delivered by countless ObamaCare zombies.”
• In “Activity vs. Inactivity,” Cato senior fellow Ilya Shapiro writes that “the ‘activity/inactivity’ distinction” at play in the ObamaCare lawsuits “becomes the last straw holding back a general federal police power that would allow Congress to require anything of the citizenry so long as it was part of a national regulatory scheme.”
• In “‘Mandate’ Mitt’s Candidacy May Be the Biggest Obstacle to Repealing ObamaCare,” Cannon argues that “Romney bears as much responsibility for ObamaCare as any Democrat, and all the Republican health policy boilerplate in the world won’t change that fact.”
• In “Obama Admin. Repeats Discredited Cost-Shifting Claim in Federal Court,” Cannon writes, “the Obama administration’s acting solicitor general…peddled the widely discredited claim that the uninsured increase your and my health insurance premiums by $1,000.”
• In “HHS Plays Chicken Little — Again,” Cannon looks at a recent Obama administration report on uncompensated care: “HHS bent over backward to make this problem appear bigger than it is.”
• In “Yes, Says Virginia, There Are Limits on Federal Power,” Shapiro looks at Virginia Attorney General, Ken Cuccinelli’s (R) arguments on why “Congress went too far in asserting the unprecedented power to compel people to enter into contracts with private insurance companies.”
• In “When Fighting ObamaCare, the Pen Is Mightier…,” Burrus looks at various challenges to ObamaCare in briefs sent to the 11th circuit in the support of a suit brought by 26 states and the National Federation of Independent Business against the health care law.

See more from the Cato Institute on health care.