Since the start of the year, Republican leaders have insisted their party would soon put forward a health care alternative to ObamaCare. That day may almost be here, as The Washington Post's Robert Costa reports the GOP leadership is finally unifying behind a conservative plan "in part to draw an election-year contrast" with Democrats and ObamaCare.
The plan includes an expansion of high-risk insurance pools, promotion of health savings accounts and inducements for small businesses to purchase coverage together.
The tenets of the plan — which could expand to include the ability to buy insurance across state lines, guaranteed renewability of policies and changes to medical-malpractice regulations — are ideas that various conservatives have for a long time backed as part of broader bills. [Washington Post]
Coming after years of GOP threats to repeal ObamaCare and revert to the old health care system, the mere fact that the party may soon offer a true, unified alternative underscores how far the policy debate has shifted since the health care exchanges went live in October. With more than 4.2 million people having now enrolled in new insurance plans via ObamaCare, calling for repeal alone would mean advocating for those millions of newly insured to lose their coverage. And polls have consistently shown that the public's general opposition to the law does not translate into support for repeal. As Jonathan Chait put it last week, Republicans "have won the public relations war over ObamaCare, and they have lost the public relations war over repealing ObamaCare."
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