Still Crazy After All These Years: The Party Of Nope Has No Alternative To Obamacare

"American Conservatives And Oppositional-Defiant Disorder"

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2013/09/arrested-development-american.html

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Republicans' Obamacare alternative is always almost here. "Lots of people treat the Republican Party's inability to unify around an alternative health-care plan, four years after the passage of the Affordable Care Act, as some kind of homework assignment they keep procrastinating on. But the problem isn't that Cantor and Boehner and Ryan would rather lay around on the sofa drinking beer and playing video games than write their health-care plan already. It's that there's no plan out there that is both ideologically acceptable to conservatives and politically defensible. Carping from the sidelines is a great strategy for Republicans because status quo bias is extremely powerful. It lets them highlight the downside of every trade-off without owning any downside of their own." Jonathan Chait in New York Magazine.

The GOP's Obamacare 'fix' does the exact opposite of what the GOP claims to want. "The CBO report finds that the GOP proposal would reduce the number of people receiving employer-sponsored health insurance by about 1 million people, but would push 500,000 to 1 million people on to Medicaid, the Children's Health Insurance Program or the Obama administration's health marketplaces." Zachary A. Goldfarb in The Washington Post.

Republicans too focused on health-care law, some in GOP warn. "Nearly every advertising dollar being spent against Democratic congressional candidates is going toward pounding them on the new health-care law. That strategy could miss the mark, warned Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, who is vice chairman of the Republican Governors Association and a possible contender for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination." Karen Tumulty in The Washington Post.