The Republican Alternative To Obamacare

As Kimberly Strassel opines in the WSJ with a fatalistic air of inevitability, there is no GOP alternative plan.

Listen. That sound of silence? That's what's known as the united Republican response to President Barack Obama's drive to socialize health care.

The president has a plan, and he's laid it on the table. The industry groups that once helped Republicans beat HillaryCare are today sitting at that table. Unions are mobilized. A liberal umbrella group, Health Care for American Now, is spending $40 million to get a "public option," a new federal entitlement that would kill off private insurance. Democrats passed a budget blueprint that will allow them to cram through that "public option" with just 51 votes.

Republicans? They're trying to figure out what they think.

It boggles my mind that Republicans (being all about choice as a factor to drive prices down) are suddenly afraid of competition. The two biggest complaints about health care in the US is cost and availability, not quality. "The government will put private insurers out of business and we'll all be on six-month waits to see a nurse!" Yes, because insurance companies would never want to compete for tens of billions of health care dollars each year.

The current plan of "private insurers driving up costs at roughly three times the rate of inflation" isn't working. Maybe somebody should step in and lower costs. What do the Republicans have for an alternative?

The White House is targeting folks like Chuck Grassley, Orrin Hatch and other Senate Republicans who back in 1997 voted for the State Children's Health Insurance Program, which was pitched by Democrats at the time as a modest program to help poor kids. It has, of course, become exactly what Democrats always intended it to be: a ballooning federal entitlement that is today transferring middle-class children from private insurance onto the federal rolls. This might be thought of as a teachable moment. But now Republican "moderates" are all ears for the administration's soothing suggestions that perhaps the "public option" can be "structured" so as to protect private insurance. Uh-huh.

Another group of Republicans are still going 50 rounds over taxes -- namely, whether a deduction isn't a more principled and cleaner way than credits to equalize the tax treatment of insurance. This is a legitimate debate, but one that should've been had 10 years ago when Republicans were in the majority. While the GOP fiddled, Democrats focused the argument on "uninsureds," which has made a tax deduction (which would only cover those who pay taxes) even less politically palatable.

Still mind-boggling. Republicans think the government providing health care for kids is a bad idea, and they're still complaining about tax credits versus deductions when 45 million Americans have no health care and when they get sick, they go to hospital emergency rooms and get taxpayer-provided care anyway.

Republicans still think health care is a privilege only of those who can afford it, and there are tens of millions of Americans who can't afford it.

When the GOP was in power, they did everything they could to kill universal health care. If we had put a plan in place 15 years ago, it would have been much cheaper and much more effective now. We've been waiting since 1994 for the great GOP alternative to universal health care. They've done nothing.

Now the Democrats get a chance.