Atrios:
Except for the fact that he beat them twice, conservative really don't have any reason to hate Obama. "Obamacare" is just the Heritage Foundation health care plan, aka Romneycare, and otherwise, uh, what?
With all due respect to the Sweet Sage of the Eschatonic—and that's more respect than you want to be carrying around most of the time—I think we need to rethink that piece of received wisdom: [jump]
- The original proposal for exchange markets to make health insurance universally available was the "buying co-ops" of Hillarycare, vintage 1993, of course with an employer mandate, filling conservatives with revulsion and dread.
- The only "original" Heritage contribution was to propose making individual consumers responsible for buying health insurance instead of their employers.
- Health insurance in Massachusetts was presumably regulated in a civilized way, as in New York and California, before they adopted a universal plan under Romney—so "Romneycare" did not impose serious regulation on masses of communities where it could never have been passed locally, as Obamacare does.
- The Massachusetts plan, like Obamacare, includes the employer mandate to which Heritage objected; the individual mandate is only for those who don't work for companies, or companies with more than ten employees. Romney vetoed the provision along with several other progressive planks, but the legislature overrode him. Romney hated the bill, though being Romney he takes credit for it because it's popular; he was being in a Romneyish way honest when he attacked the Obama law. It should be called Teddycare because the late Senator Kennedy is the one whose negotiating genius made it happen.
- There's a public option!!! as I began suspecting about a year ago. Actually a kind of public-private option as detailed in today's Times:
scores of new health insurance options to be offered to consumers around the country by the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association and the United States Office of Personnel Management, the agency that arranges health benefits for federal employees, according to administration officials.
The options are part of a multistate insurance program that Congress authorized in 2010 to increase options for consumers shopping in the online insurance markets scheduled to open on Tuesday.
It is for that small minority of people subject to the individual mandate (and to the subsidies up to 400% of the poverty line that go along with it) and it will help keep premiums relatively low for those who buy private insurance as well. As you'll remember the issue with the public option was not so much SOSHULISM as the providers' fear of competition; they preferred their traditional prix-fixed cartels.
Republicans resisted the idea, as did the American Medical Association and many drug companies, which feared that a government-run insurance program could set prices and drive private insurers from the market.
And guess what: It's starting to work in a really interesting way, as we learn from
the tale of Trader Joe's, which has decided to refuse to sponsor health care plans for part time workers for unexpected reasons: because it's
better for the workers.
The email offers the example of a single mom making $18 an hour working 25 hours a week who currently pays $166.50 per month for her Trader Joe’s coverage. With the tax credits under the ACA, the message says, she can get nearly identical insurance for roughly half that under an Obamacare health insurance exchange. Add to that the $500 she’ll get in January and the bleak picture of lost benefits starts to change rather dramatically.
One of these days companies are going to start wondering why they can't apply this kind of logic to their full-time employees as well, and before you know it our dear little health care law is going to be a great big bumptious teenager! So please just stop with the Obama-is-basically-a-Republican theme.
I love, by the way, how the congressional Republicans bragged on the hipster burritos they consumed as they plotted their coup:
Little do they realize that the Qdoba Mexican Grill chain is the
terrific liberal shop that proves fast food companies can provide their employees with health insurance (and 401Ks) without going bankrupt. According to the Heritage Foundation, Qdoba shouldn't even be able to exist.
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| Blake Farenthold's order? Sorry, that was really uncalled for. Can't make myself delete it though, somehow. Maybe because of this. Image from foundshit. |
