Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Republican Origins of Obamacare

Paul Krugman has this correct. When the Republicans are in power, they are as bad as the Democrats:
The essence of Obamacare, as of Romneycare, is a three-legged stool of regulation and subsidies: community rating requiring insurers to make the same policies available to everyone regardless of health status; an individual mandate, requiring everyone to purchase insurance, so that healthy people don’t opt out; and subsidies to keep insurance affordable for those with lower incomes.

The original Heritage plan from 1989 had all these features.

These days, Heritage strives mightily to deny the obvious; it picks at essentially minor differences between what it used to advocate and the plan Democrats actually passed, and tries to make them seem like a big deal. But this is disinformation. The essential features of the ACA — above all, the mandate — are ideas Republicans used to support.

5 comments:

  1. He is equating Republicans with Conservatives. I am not sure I agree with that. Even Nixon wanted a guaranteed family income, a good sized one at that, which is to me more socialist than conservative. As time goes on I become more cynical, that R = D and they put on a show they are "fighting" for one sub-group of Americans or another, when in fact if you look at the problems they are "fighting", they are the ones that created them.

    Give me a Conservative or a Republican, I'll take the Conservative. Thanks for listening.

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  2. Bullshit. The Heritage Foundation is conservative, and they came up for this. Conservatism, as well as social democracy, is statism. STFU.

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  3. So is this proof that Krugman has been reading Ron Paul?

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  4. "Conservatism, as well as social democracy, is statism."

    I get your point. I think we agree more than you may think.

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  5. Why is Krugman so partisan if he understands the truth of Democrat and Republican equivalency? It seems like he'd be ok with either side winning as long as one has complete power of executive and legislative branches in order to more easily advance the statist agenda.

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