Norm Ornstein is a political scientist and resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington, D.C., conservative think tank; he's not some pinko liberal. But he looks at the American health care system with clear, nonpartisan eyes, and this article is a concise wrap-up of the problem now facing Republicans: They're the dog that caught the car. Now what?
The fact is that Obamacare is a conservative plan, using private insurance companies; it's far from being a "government takeover" of the health care system. If you want socialized medicine, look at the U.K., where doctors, nurses, and hospital staff are government employees. Their cost per patient is roughly half of what the U.S. used to spend, pre-Obamacare, and their outcomes were better. It was originally proposed in 1993 by the Heritage Foundation, a staunchly conservative organization, as an alternative to "Hillarycare," the scheme Bill Clinton tried to pass lo these many years ago. A similar form was "Romneycare," introduced in Massachusetts in 2006 by a conservative Republican governor, Mitt Romney.
There simply is no way the Republicans can come up with a better plan -- aside from possibly a few tweaks and improvements, but keeping the same basic framework as Obamacare -- without resorting to liberal measures, such as single-payer, with government regulation. Yes, they could come up with a cheaper, better system: single payer, used in every other country in the developed world. But they won't, because that's "liberal," and they can't do that. Their rigid "small government, free market" ideology precludes it.
Ornstein explains the situation in detail, but in a clear and concise fashion; it's an article well worth reading,
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