GOP in denial on health care law

[NNN0LHI]

http://www.jsonline.com/news/opinion/gop-in-denial-on-health-care-law-7467m0k-163923616.html

July 26, 2012 4:15 p.m

By George Wagner

Obamacare, i.e., the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA), is likely to fade in importance as we approach the November elections because when you get down to the specifics, it has many provisions that the GOP doesn't want to run against.

Consider the Wisconsin Republicans running against U.S. Rep. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) for the U.S. Senate. If you take the name Obamacare away and ask them what they think about insurance companies not being able to kick you off their plan or deny you coverage because of pre-existing conditions or lifting lifetime coverage limits or being able to retain coverage if you quit a job or insuring kids through 25 on their parents' plans or enabling middle-income people to purchase insurance at a moderate cost, you'll hear nary a discouraging word.

Of course they love to run against the dreaded "individual mandate." We all know by now that Mitt Romney and Tommy Thompson both supported mandates in the past. The idea itself was first floated by the conservative Heritage Foundation. But now that it's part of President Barack Obama's health care reform law, it's condemned.

They tie themselves into knots trying to prove how their former support of mandates is really something different than the ACA's. When Romney says the bill he supported in Massachusetts was good for the Bay State but shouldn't be imposed on the nation, does he mean that Bostonians are some alien species that gets sick differently from the rest of the country?

[Wait Wut]

1. The Republican I work with...

...got a $64 rebate from BCBS today. He didn't know what it was, so I told him. His take on it, "So, Obama's trying to buy my vote?"

"That's not a check from Pres. Obama nor the US Govt. you have in your hands, is it?"

After further explaining why he received the check, he shut up and skittered out of the room...mumbling about how he was going to spend it on poker tonite.