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The Eternal Mystery of Republican Health Care Policy

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One summary of Republican health care principles:

That’s the fundamental belief that motivates most, if not all, the conservative opposition: Health care should be a privilege rather than a right. If you can’t afford health insurance on your own, that is not the government’s problem.

I happen to find this belief morally bizarre. People who cannot afford their own insurance either don’t earn much money, or have health risks, or family members with health risks, too expensive to bear.

[…]

Indeed, very few Republicans have the confidence to make the case openly that the inability of some people to afford the cost of their own medical care is their own problem. But that is the belief that sets them apart from major conservative parties across the world, and it is the belief that explains why they have opposed national health insurance every time Democrats have held power, and why they have neglected to create national health insurance every time they have.

Hmm. Chait’s unorthodox view seems to derive the content of Republican health care policy based on such strange metrics as “what Republicans do when they control the legislative and executive branches of state and federal governments” and “what conservative intellectuals favor” and “what conservative politicians favor when not creating transparent decoys during periods when they need to pretend to have an alternative.” Odd. If you use more relevant measures like “what laws single Republican governors (mostly) sign when massive veto-proof majorities of New England Democrats put them on their desk” and “what New England Republican Senators who also favor national handgun bans propose when Republicans are in opposition,” you’ll see that the Affordable Care Act represents long-standing Republican policy preferences, even if it took that dastardly neoliberal sellout Obama to use the third term of the Bush administration to pass it.

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