The GOP’s 20-Year War on Health Care

[babylonsister]

07.25.14
The GOP’s 20-Year War on Health Care
Michael Tomasky


John Boehner says Republicans are planning their Obamacare alternative. Don’t hold your breath. The party has done nada constructive for decades.

Stop the presses: John Boehner admitted Thursday that the Republican Party’s long-awaited alternative to Obamacare needs a little more time in the oven. “You know, the discussions about Obamacare and what the replacement bill would look like continue. We’re trying to build consensus around one plan,” the Speaker told Hill reporters. “Not there yet.”

As if you even needed me to tell you, rest assured: It could be six months from now, a year from now, five years from now, or the day Bibi Netanyahu and Khaled Mashal share a Nobel Peace Prize—they aren’t going to have a plan. Oh, they might have a “plan.” They had a “plan” last year, or at least Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn and two others did. For about two days, they were really tooting its horn. Then it dawned on people that paying for it would involve a hefty middle-class tax increase, on higher-end insurance plans. You may have noticed since then that the Coburn “plan” has not exactly become a leading Republican talking point.

As conservatives continue to hail the Halbig decision, some historical context is called for. In my last column, I wrote that conservatives and Republicans are going to extraordinary lengths to see that more Americans die. Not every reader was won over by that opinion, as you might imagine. But I think it’s beyond dispute, as a little discussion of political history should show.

The problem of millions of uninsured has existed in this country since—well, since forever. But as a running news story that the media paid attention to, for the last 25 or 30 years. I remember when the then-horrifying number was 15 million uninsured. Then 20 million, then 30 million, on up to the 46 million figure we often saw bandied about before the Affordable Health Care was enacted (10 million new Americans are insured as a result of it—a very respectable dent, for just one year). So, 30 years, a full generation, tens of millions of people adversely affected. And what, in all that time, has the Grand Old Party proposed to do about it all?

Not. One. Thing. Republican presidents had (if we go back to 1984) 16 years to pass some kind of health-insurance law. But none of the three ever even proposed one. George W. Bush did pass his Medicare law, but that was about adding prescription-drug coverage for seniors; it didn’t insure any previously uninsured citizens. What the GOP did instead, of course, was to fight tooth-and-nail to stop the two Democratic attempts to insure more people, succeeding the first time, failing the second.

more...

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/07/25/the-gop-s-20-year-war-on-health-care.html

[merrily]

1. Nixon and Carter both tried health plans, but received opposition.

Toward the end of his life, Kennedy, who did so much about health issues, ruefully admitted that he had blocked the health care plan that Nixon had proposed in 1974 because he (Kennedy) had wanted a Democratic President to pass health care.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/09/16/jimmy-carter-ted-kennedy-health-insurance_n_720356.html

A Wyoming group of conservatives, alarmed that Nixon had proposed an employer mandate, got to work on what the Heritage Foundation eventually proposed: a plan with an individual mandate, which became part of Billarycare, Romneycare and Obamacare.

President Carter claimed that Kennedy had done the same thing to the health care plan that Carter wanted. Id. So, it is possible that Kennedy had not, in 1974, been concerned simply with having just any Democratic President pass health care.

Meanwhile, the country became increasingly unable to pass anything rational. Yadda, yadda, yadda. America got no health care plan whatever until 2010, effective (in part) in 2014, forty years after Nixon's proposal.

I don't think Americans do themselves any favors blaming only one side for everything in America that is not good. It's simply not reality.

[rurallib]

2. It was a news story when I was a kid - some 50-60 years ago

The party of NO has been stopping health care since one of their own - Teddy Roosevelt - first proposed such a concept.