Oh,right! Dylan Matthews at Wonkblog has the answer -- a reminder! -- and it's a doozy!
Remember “repeal and replace”? That was the Republican party’s 2010-vintage response to the Affordable Care Act. It wasn’t that they opposed the idea of universal health care; they just thought that the Obama administration and their allies in Congress went about it the wrong way. They wouldn’t just repeal the bill. They’d replace it with something better.
But what? The Romney campaign was very vague on this point, and the few points of commonality Congressional Republicans have on the issue don’t add up to a full replacement. Four years ago, however, they did. It was called the Patients’ Choice Act, it was proposed by Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) and Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), two of the most influential Congressional Republicans on the issue, and it was a credible way of covering almost all Americans; the House bill got 13 co-sponsors (nine of whom are still in office) and the Senate bill got seven (six of whom are still in office). ...Wonkblog
Matthews lays out the guidelines of that "Patients' Choice Act" and guess what? With some exceptions (cuts to Medicaid, and some slight alterations in administration) the Patients' Choice Act is -- ta-da! -- Obamacare!
Obamacare bears a heavy resemblance to basically every real universal health-care plan that Republican legislators have proposed in the past half century, including the Patients’ Choice Act, Sen. John Chafee’s (R-R.I.) plan offered as an alternative to Hillarycare in 1993, and the universal plan Richard Nixon offered at the end of his presidency. ...Wonkblog
In a better America, we used to call this negotiation, normal politics. But in the me-me world of the Republicans, this is an insult -- yet another slap in the face of the taxpayer. All this sturm und drang is paid for by us.
