Conservative health-care-policy ideas reside in an uncertain state of quasi-existence. You can describe the policies in the abstract, sometimes even in detail, but any attempt to reproduce them in physical form will cause such proposals to disappear instantly. It’s not so much an issue of “hypocrisy,” as Klein frames it, as a deeper metaphysical question of whether conservative health-care policies actually exist.
The question should be posed to better-trained philosophical minds than my own. I would posit that conservative health-care policies do not exist in any real form. Call it the “Heritage Uncertainty Principle.”
Part of the reason this made me laugh is that in The Book (current working title: Rethinking Religion: Being Religious in a Modern, Tolerant, Progressive, Peaceful and Science-affirming World) there’s a chapter titled “God and Existence” that contains variations on the theme of the nature of existence, drawing on science and philosophy, to argue that “existence” is mostly indefinable, and depending on how it is defined anything could be said to either exist or not exist. The point in context of The Book is that it’s really stupid to argue about whether God exists, even assuming we had any idea what God is. But the Republican health care plan is a good example, too.
Chait’s theme is that Republican health care plans going back to the beginning of the Clinton Administration are ephemeral things that “exist” as thought-objects only as long as there’s no plan to implement them. For example,
In 1993, Republican minority leader Bob Dole supported a version of it to demonstrate that Republicans did not endorse the status quo, until Democrats, facing the demise of their own plan, tried to bring up Dole’s plan, at which point Dole renounced his own plan.
Mitt Romney, clearly too thick to understand how the game is played, screwed the pooch by putting an actual conservative health care plan into effect in Massachusetts. The Republican response has been to hang what was mostly a Heritage/Romney plan around the neck of President Obama and call it socialized medicine. The wonder is that, years ago anyway, Heritage came up with a plan that was do-able in the real world, even if clumsy. I doubt Heritage will make that mistake again. Or could if they tried.
Brian Beutler points out that current Republican “plans” on the “table” suffer from the same weaknesses they perceive in Obamacare.
The cornerstone of nearly every conservative health care reform plan is to eliminate or dramatically reduce the tax preference for employer-sponsored health insurance and use the revenues to help people pay for their own coverage. But the disruptions that would entail would dwarf the ones Obamacare is creating, and conservative wonks realized that by opportunistically attacking Obamacare, political operatives had just crafted the very attacks that could ultimately doom their own policymaking pursuits. …
…Two weeks ago a trio of Republican senators introduced a plan to replace Obamacare. Conservatives everywhere, including Ponnuru and his National Review colleagues, applauded it. But its authors will seemingly have to choose between actually financing it or inviting the same severe market disruptions the GOP is now on record opposing. The plan itself called, somewhat confusingly, for “cap[ping] the tax exclusion for employee’s health coverage at 65 percent of an average plan’s costs.” Yuval Levin surmised reasonably that they meant capping it at the 65th percentile of employer plans. But either way its authors became caught in the trap their own party set for them in the fall. When questions started rolling in about market disruptions, they made a dramatic change to their white paper. The cap would now be set, vaguely, at “65 percent of the average market price for an expensive high-option plan,” presumably at the expense of revenues required to finance the plan’s coverage goals.
The plan is just a prop, anyway. It’s a means to allow the Wall Street Journal editorial page to run headlines that Republicans have a better way to fix health care. It’s like the stacks of paper they were carting around when the ACA was being voted on in Congress; they’d hold their stacks of paper up at press conferences and say, see? We have a health care plan, too. But the paper was just a prop. Even after the ACA was passed and the GOP started talking about “repeal and replace,” they still didn’t have a “replace.”