“Revisionist History”: Chris Christie Shows Why The GOP Is Hopeless On Health Care Reform
With the rollout of the health care exchanges created by Obamacare hitting some bumps, to put it mildly, and President Obama’s approval rating falling to new lows, it seems like now would be the perfect time for Republicans to take control of the health care issue. Yet they haven’t.
Why? To figure that out, look no further than the GOP’s darling of the moment, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.
Fresh off a re-election rout, plenty of conservatives are pointing to Christie as the hope for a new, modern and revitalized GOP. And at the Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council 2013 yesterday, Christie knew his cue, saying, “Obamacare is a failure, it’s always been a failure and it will not succeed. It just won’t.”
But when asked what he would replace it with, Christie first demurred, saying he didn’t have enough time to flesh out a solution, but then added:
Obamacare is wrong, it’s a failure, it’s the most extraordinary overreach of government power in the history of our country. And it’s being run by people who have never run anything. So why are we surprised it’s failing?
What do we need to replace it? We need a robust debate among both sides. Unlike last time, where the president jammed this down everybody’s throat and got not one Republican vote because he was unwilling to make any compromise, including tort reform, for god’s sake. Well, then this time we need a robust conversation between both sides where everybody brings skin to the table and everybody compromises. And if we do that we can craft a solution.
This is just red meat, not a constructive discussion of the nation’s health care problems. And it’s emblematic of the mainstream GOP’s fact-free approach to health care reform and the problems it’s having landing punches against Obamacare.
For starters, it’s simply incorrect that the Obamacare exchanges are “being run by people who have never run anything.” Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius, after all, ran a state (she was the governor of Kansas, not exactly a socialist utopia), which I imagine Christie counts as executive experience. And President Obama, like it or not, has been at the helm of the world’s largest economy and military since 2009.
But far more importantly, Christie’s only solution to the health care conundrum is more “debate.” He seems to believe that health care reform would have gone just fine if mean old Obama hadn’t “jammed this down everybody’s throat” without making any compromises. That’s revisionist history, to say the least.
Back here in reality, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., spent months fruitlessly trying to get Republicans to sign onto a health care bill, which was also endlessly debated in committee, in each chamber of Congress and on the airwaves. There are a slew of provisions in the law that come from various proposals Republicans have put forth over the years, including some lifted from their Obamacare alternative, but they earned Obama not one Republican vote.
Obama also ditched the public option – a government run plan in the health care exchange – as a concession, for which he got nothing in return except accusations that he was engineering a “government takeover” of health care. Oh, and Christie’s magical tort reform, the GOP silver bullet? Obama has offered it to Republicans multiple times, and in response, they did nothing. (Tort reform, in the end, would result in scant savings anyway.)
This is not to deny that Obamacare has its problems, but simply to highlight that the GOP had the opportunity to be constructive during the health care debate, and instead chose across-the-board opposition and obstruction as an explicit political strategy to bring about Obama’s “Waterloo.”
Now, years later and with Obamacare faltering, the best the GOP’s newest star can muster is to tell the same old tales in the same old way. Complicating the matter is the fact that the few ideas conservatives do have for health care reform would result in many of the same things which Republicans are now criticizing. Reforms favored by the GOP would cause people to lose their insurance plans, even if they like them. And they would cut Medicare. Gasp!
Christie either knows this and can’t say it, because he would then be vilified by the conservative base, or he is just another Republican who doesn’t understand the tradeoffs involved in reforming America’s inefficient, wasteful and oftentimes completely backward health care system. And his refusal to even try to formulate a coherent health care alternative shows why, even after 40-something repeal votes and a disastrous rollout of the exchanges, Obamacare is still very much the law of the land.
By: Pat Garofalo, U. S. News and World Report, November 19, 2013
“Intentionally Obscuring The Obvious”: Five Things Every American Needs To Know About Health Care Reform
“Discover the obvious,” Jonathan Cohn said on Monday.
Cohn is one of the nation’s foremost health care journalists and the keynote speaker of the journalism portion of “Hearsay or Fact: A Symposium on the Communication of the Affordable Care Act,” hosted by the Center for Healthcare Research and Transformation.
A senior editor at The New Republic and author of Sick: The Untold Story of America’s Health Care Crisis—and the People Who Pay the Price, Cohn decided to use his time to give five rules about reporting on the Affordable Care Act (ACA). His first rule was an admission that people who follow the everyday tribulations related to Obamacare — like wonks in every field — often assume they don’t need to report on “the obvious” and thus fail to report on the issues that matter most to the public.
He pointed to the success of fellow panelist Stephen Brill’s Time magazine cover story “Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us” that illuminated the outrageous variation in medical prices and profits from one hospital and one patient to the next, a well-known fact to experts that came as a shock to many Americans.
What’s obvious to everyone about the debate over Obamacare is that the public is confused. Nearly two-thirds of Americans didn’t know in late September that the health care exchanges were opening on October 1 and 67 percent of the uninsured said “they don’t have enough information about the law to know how it will impact their families,” according to the Kaiser Health Tracking Poll. The uninsured, of course, make up this law’s key demographic. They are the people this law is designed to help most, and their participation in the health care marketplaces will determine if the law is a success.
Why are people so confused? Much of what should be “obvious” has become obscured — intentionally.
Democrats passed the ACA with only Democratic votes — and Joe Lieberman. Republicans have responded with an unprecedented effort to scare voters, starve implementation and sabotage the law, an effort that helped doom the launch of Healthcare.gov, which the White House has to own as a greater act of self-sabotage than anything Republicans could have pulled off themselves.
The political battle over the law has overwhelmed any pertinent policy discussion. So it’s no wonder that people can’t even agree on the basic premises that made health reform necessary and an improvement over the current system, with 56 percent of Americans saying they’ve heard more about the politics and the controversies of the law than any discussion of its practical impact.
Here are five “obvious” premises that every American needs to understand so we can begin to have a rational debate on health care reform.
Before The ACA, America’s Health Care System Was Already ‘Socialized’
You should know by now that the United States spends more than any country on health care, even though approximately 50 million citizens have no insurance whatsoever. This is how we ended up with the 46th most efficient health care system in the world.
The Affordable Care Act attempts to fix this in a number of ways, including health care exchanges, subsidies, Medicaid expansion and regulation.
Since 2011, the government has set how much insurance companies have to spend on actual care – 80-85 percent depending on their size — and the minimum standard for the policies they can offer, among several other regulations. So even though private insurers remain in business and the government hasn’t taken control of the medical industry as it has in the United Kingdom, Republicans argue that it’s “a government takeover” of the health care system. Based on this standard, health care has been “taken over” by the government and even “socialized” for decades.
Since 1965, Americans over 65 and under the poverty level were guaranteed basic care, though it took until 1982 before the last state, Arizona, accepted Medicaid. This left America with a single-payer system, with a giant hole mostly made up of Americans under 65 with jobs, and their families.
In 1986, President Ronald Reagan signed a bill that tried to plug that hole — the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act. This law states that any hospital that accepts any federal funds — which basically every hospital in America does — cannot turn away any patient, regardless of his or her ability to pay. As this bill provides no reimbursement for this care, the costs of those who can’t pay get passed on to those who can.
In 1996, Congress passed and President Clinton signed the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA), which mandated guaranteed renewability for all health insurance plans, requiring that an insurer has to offer you renewals of your policy without charging you any more based on any new information it has about your health.
These are three of the key “government takeovers” that helped lead to the broken health care system that we are now attempting to fix, while maintaining a private insurance industry.
The ACA clearly isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution, health economist Thomas Buchmueller pointed out at Monday’s symposium.
That would be a two-page bill that said, more or less, “Everyone is now on Medicare.”
Rich People Get Their Health Care Subsidized By Taxpayers
Single payer is a simple, proven system that would insure all Americans, save lives and cut costs. And it will likely never happen in America as long as the filibuster exists in the Senate. Still, liberals will not stop offering this ideal solution whenever Republicans complain about costs or cancellations.
The right has its own fantasy solution that is about as improbable as single payer: getting rid of the tax exclusion of premiums for employer-sponsored insurance.
As a result of an accident of history, employers and employees do not have to pay taxes on costs of health insurance policies.
Conservatives hate this. “We call the tax exclusion for ESI a tax ‘break,’ but when you think about it, it operates more like a tax hike,” writes the Cato Institute’s director of health policy Michael F. Cannon, another symposium participant. “It coerces workers into handing control over $11,000 of their earnings to their employers, who then choose the workers’ health plans for them.”
John McCain campaigned for president on ending this “tax break,” which costs taxpayers more than the costs of all the subsidies and Medicaid expansion in the ACA, according to symposium participant Dr. John Z. Ayanian. This will never happen because it would be far more disruptive than Medicare for All and — unlike effective single-payer systems around the globe — it has never been proven to work, anywhere.
As a result, taxpayers will continue to help subsidize takers like Ted Cruz, whose family’s $40,000-a-year insurance policy from Goldman Sachs entitles them to a subsidy large enough to put a family of four on Medicaid, though the Cruzes are clearly able to afford their own health insurance.
Republican Arguments Against Obamacare Are Opportunistic And Contradictory
Republicans fought the passage of the ACA by conjuring images of “death panels” pulling the plug on grandma and a “government takeover” that would destroy America.
The problem with these warnings was that approximately 80 percent of Americans get their health insurance through their employers. Most of these people haven’t and likely won’t notice much of a change in their coverage whatsoever, unless they’ve gone in for preventive or reproductive health care and discovered that they didn’t have to pay a co-pay for it.
That’s why Mitt Romney’s continual assertion that President Obama was embracing “European” solutions never made sense to most Americans.
Republicans didn’t seize on the president’s now-disproven promise “If you like your insurance, you can keep it” until late 2013, though it was clear that it never jibed with his other promise to make sure insurance policies met minimum standards.
Now their fixation on cancellation notices boxes them in, in two ways. First, it ignores that their plot to repeal Obamacare would result in as many as 137 million cancellation notices. Second, right-wing policy proposals would force cancellations that target far more than the estimated 5 percent of Americans who are having their plans changed by the ACA.
“Even if free-market health care reformers were able to pass the plan of their dreams — which would involve tweaking the tax code to end the bias in favor of employer-sponsored insurance — it would likely mean a lot of people would get dropped from their current plans,” the Washington Examiner’s Philip A. Klein notes.
The Republicans’ advantage is that they’re so stuck on the “repeal” part of “repeal and replace” that they’ve never actually passed an ACA replacement. Their rhetoric, and the fact that the only real conservative alternative to single payer requires an individual mandate, means any plan they pass would likely end up generating the same criticisms they’re lobbing at the ACA.
We Can’t Go Back To The Pre-Obamacare Health System
Dr. Ayanian pointed out that though the ACA may not be embraced by a majority of the American public, three key policies have: young people staying on their parents’ plans until age 26, closing the Medicare Part D prescription-drug donut hole, and the ending of concerns about pre-existing conditions.
The Republican Study Committee Obamacare replacement plan, which the House has not voted on, provided pre-existing conditions protections, but only for those who are already insured.
The Washington Post’s Jonathan Bernstein puts it simply — repeal “is dead”:
No one is ever going to kick young adults off their parents’ insurance (or change the law so that insurance companies are allowed to do it). No one is going to bring back the various limitations in pre-ACA insurance policies. Some trimming of the new Medicaid rolls might be possible. But no one — no politician who has to face reelection, at least – is going to just toss all those people off their insurance with nothing to replace it.
Beyond all this is simply the Humpty Dumpty-ness of the situation: The old system has been slowly pushed off the wall for three years now, and by this point it’s really beyond repair, whatever the merits or politics of the situation. Garance Franke-Ruta captured some of this in making the point that delaying things would be impractical at this point, but it really goes beyond that. Too many people have already done too many things to make a full reversal even remotely plausible.
Before the ACA became law, millions of Americans lost their insurance, rates were rising faster than the rate of inflation and the federal government was absorbing more and more health care costs. Repealing it would be a nightmare in that it would reveal a broken health care system badly in need of some type of fix.
Republicans Are Hurting Themselves, Their States And The Working Poor To ‘Punish’ Obama
Because the Supreme Court gave them the chance to do it, about two dozen — all Republican — states have completely rejected the Medicaid expansion in the ACA, even though the government will cover 100 percent of the costs of the expansion for the first three years. States could then opt out of the coverage or continue it with the feds’ contribution decreasing to 90 percent by 2020.
Medicaid expansion should be a huge transfer of wealth from rich blue states to poorer red states, as most of America’s public assistance programs are. Instead Texas, with the largest uninsured population in the nation, has rejected expansion, but will still contribute to helping to insure Californians.
By rejecting Medicaid expansion, just four states – Florida, Texas, Georgia, and North Carolina — will leave 5 million poor people with jobs uninsured. This will result in more emergency room visits that the uninsured cannot afford, and higher rates for the insured in those states.
By: Jason Sattler, The National Memo, November 5, 2013
“The Myth Of Obamacare’s Bad Sales Job”: The Complexity Makes It Easy For Republicans To Lie To The Public
When they went forward with their plan to shut down the government in order to undo, defund, or otherwise undermine the Affordable Care Act (ACA), conservatives convinced themselves that their plan was going to work because Americans hate Obamacare. If you look at it in an extremely narrow, context-free way, that’s sort of true. If you just ask people whether they approve of the ACA, you get between 35 percent and 45 percent approval. But the closer you look, the more complicated it gets. Some people disapprove of it because they feel it didn’t go far enough; add them with those who say they approve, and you’ll get a majority. Furthermore, and most critical for what I’d like to discuss, the actual components of the law, like giving people subsidies to buy insurance, outlawing denials for pre-existing conditions, and so on, are extremely popular (the one exception is the individual mandate).
One thing’s for sure, though: You can’t say that the ACA as an abstract entity is overwhelmingly popular. That has led a lot of liberals to blame Barack Obama for doing a bad job selling the law. I must have heard or read this from a hundred liberals over the last couple of years. If only he had sold it better! Then we wouldn’t be in this mess. Sometimes, I’ve actually heard people say that he never really tried to sell it.
This argument is complete bunk. Here’s why.
1. Obama did sell it. When somebody says that Obama should have sold the ACA better, you should ask them what, specifically, they think he should have done. I can offer you a stone-cold guarantee that whatever they suggest is something that the administration and its allies did, in fact, do. Take polls to figure out what appeals would be effective? Check. Distribute talking points to their allies to get everyone repeating the same message? Check. Make one speech after another on health care? Check. Run ads touting reform? Check. They did it all. So why didn’t it work?
2. Health insurance is inherently complicated. See if you can answer these questions about your own health insurance. What’s your co-pay for office visits? What’s your deductible? What about cost-sharing for hospital admissions? Your yearly out-of-pocket maximum? Does your policy have a lifetime limit? My guess is you couldn’t answer some or all of these questions, and that only scratches the surface of the contract you signed when you got insurance. Did you read it? You probably skimmed it but didn’t bother to go through it line by line, just like you did the last time you downloaded a piece of software. Health insurance is incredibly complicated. Even people whose job it is to deal with health policy don’t always understand their own insurance.
That means that any comprehensive reform that tried to address the pathologies of the system was going to have a hard time even explaining to people what was wrong with that system. And those pathologies are so numerous that the administration had to discuss multiple things, while the opposition only had to say that Obamacare sucks. We’ll get to that opposition in a moment, but first:
3. The Affordable Care Act was an extremely complicated bill. I discussed this in my column last week, but the ACA is a gigantic kludge, a cobbled-together jumble of features each meant to solve a practical or political problem. The administration decided that the simple thing—Medicare for all—couldn’t succeed politically. They also decided that it was vital to be able to tell people, “If you like your current insurance, you can keep it.” They also had to keep conservative Democrats on board to get above the 60 votes necessary to defeat a Republican filibuster in the Senate. They also decided to co-opt the various interest groups like insurance companies, doctors, and hospitals that benefit from the current system, which required more complexity. They also decided that every penny of it was going to be paid for, which required new taxes and spending cuts. In and of themselves each of those decisions may have been reasonable, but they added up to a complex bill that was going to be difficult to explain, no matter how good their pollsters were and how effective a speaker the President is.
4. The American public is not particularly well informed or sophisticated when it comes to understanding policy. We don’t have to go into all the details here, but anybody who sets out on a project to explain something both new and complex to a public that doesn’t understand these things very well to begin with and doesn’t much care is going to be fighting an uphill battle.
5. They were facing an extraordinarily well-financed, united opposition that would say or do pretty much anything. All that complexity made it easy to just lie to the public about what the ACA does. When people hear about some new horror the ACA allegedly includes, many are ready to believe it, since it contains so many different things they already don’t understand. So conservatives could tell them that there are death panels, or that Obamacare forces doctors to collect information on your sex life, or that the IRS is going to have your medical records, or that Congress “exempted itself from Obamacare,” or whatever else they were able to dream up.
The opposition also had the benefit of being against something, which is always easier than being for something. We’re naturally more attuned to negative information than positive information, which is why it’s so easy to use fear to create opposition to a new policy, and change is always frightening. “You’re going to love this change!” is an inherently more difficult case to make than “Be afraid!”
Furthermore, the alliance opposing the law has virtually limitless resources at its disposal. Yesterday The New York Times published a revealing story on the network of conservative funders and activists that have made it their mission to destroy the ACA, including masterminding the current shutdown. Just one Koch brothers-linked organization no one has ever heard of called Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce distributed an incredible $200 million last year alone to various groups fighting the ACA.
Let me close this discussion with a little historical reminder. In March of 1994, when the Clinton health-care reform was being debated, The Wall Street Journal published an article about polls and focus groups it had conducted on the plan. The article was titled “Many Don’t Realize It’s the Clinton Plan They Like,” and it detailed how, while majorities of the public expressed disapproval of Bill Clinton’s health-care plan, when its features were described to them without saying whose plan it was, majorities expressed approval of it. That’s exactly the same thing we find now with the ACA. The problem wasn’t that Barack Obama didn’t try hard enough to sell it.
Fortunately, the success of the law won’t depend on whether you can get a majority of the public to tell pollsters, “I approve of Obamacare.” Once it’s fully implemented, the only thing that will matter will be whether, in all its different component parts, it works.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, October 7, 2013
“Health Reform Turns Real”: Even The “Bad News” On Obamacare Start-Up Is Really Good News For The Program’s Future
At this point, the crisis in American governance has taken on a life of its own. Some Republicans are now saying openly that they want concessions in return for reopening the government and avoiding default, not because they have any specific policy goals in mind, but simply because they don’t want to feel “disrespected.” And no endgame is in sight.
But this confrontation did start with a real issue: Republican efforts to stop Obamacare from going into effect. It’s long been clear that the great fear of the Republican Party was not that health reform would fail, but that it would succeed. And developments since Tuesday, when the exchanges on which individuals will buy health insurance opened for business, strongly suggest that their worst fears will indeed be realized: This thing is going to work.
Wait a minute, some readers are saying. Haven’t many stories so far been of computer glitches, of people confronting screens telling them that servers are busy and that they should try again later? Indeed, they have. But everyone knowledgeable about the process always expected some teething problems, and the nature of this week’s problems has actually been hugely encouraging for supporters of the program.
First, let me say a word about the underlying irrelevance of start-up troubles for new government programs.
Political reporting in America, especially but not only on TV, tends to be focused on the play-by-play. Who won today’s news cycle? And, to be fair, this sort of thing may matter during the final days of an election.
But Obamacare isn’t up for a popular referendum, or a revote of any kind. It’s the law, and it’s going into effect. Its future will depend on how it works over the next few years, not the next few weeks.
To illustrate the point, consider Medicare Part D, the drug benefit, which went into effect in 2006. It had what was widely considered a disastrous start, with seniors unclear on their benefits, pharmacies often refusing to honor valid claims, computer problems, and more. In the end, however, the program delivered lasting benefits, and woe unto any politician proposing that it be rolled back.
So the glitches of October won’t matter in the long run. But why are they actually encouraging? Because they appear, for the most part, to be the result of the sheer volume of traffic, which has been much heavier than expected. And this means that one big worry of Obamacare supporters — that not enough people knew about the program, so that many eligible Americans would fail to sign up — is receding fast.
Of course, it’s important that people who want to sign up can actually do so. But the computer problems can and will be fixed. So, by March 31, when enrollment for 2014 closes, we can be reasonably sure that millions of Americans who were previously uninsured will have coverage under the Affordable Care Act. Obamacare will have become a reality, something people depend on, rather than some fuzzy notion Republicans could demonize. And it will be very hard to take that coverage away.
What we still don’t know, and is crucial for the program’s longer-term success, is who will sign up. Will there be enough young, healthy enrollees to provide a favorable risk pool and keep premiums relatively low? Bear in mind that conservative groups have been spending heavily — and making some seriously creepy ads — in an effort to dissuade young people from signing up for insurance. Nonetheless, insurance companies are betting that young people will, in fact, sign up, as shown by the unexpectedly low premiums they’re offering for next year.
And the insurers are probably right. To see why anti-Obamacare messaging is probably doomed to fail, think about whom we’re talking about here. That is, who are the healthy uninsured individuals the program needs to reach? Well, they’re by and large not affluent, because affluent young people tend to get jobs with health coverage. And they’re disproportionately nonwhite.
In other words, to get a description of the typical person Obamacare needs to enroll, just take the description of a typical Tea Party member or Fox News viewer — older, affluent, white — and put a “not” in front of each characteristic. These are people the right-wing message machine is not set up to talk to, but who can be reached through many of the same channels, from ads on Spanish-language media to celebrity tweets, that turned out Obama voters last year. I have to admit, I find the image of hard-line conservatives defeated by an army of tweeting celebrities highly attractive; but it’s also realistic. Enrollment is probably going to be just fine.
So Obamacare is off to a good start, with even the bad news being really good news for the program’s future. We’re not quite there yet, but more and more, it looks as if health reform is here to stay.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, October 3, 2013
“Weight Loss, No Exercise”: Four Years Later, The Second Half Of The Republican “Repeal And Replace” Plan
At his press conference late last week, President Obama chided congressional Republicans for voting to repeal the Affordable Care Act several dozen times without offering a credible alternative. “They used to say they had a replacement,” he told reporters. “That never actually arrived, right? I mean, I’ve been hearing about this whole replacement thing for two years — now I just don’t hear about it, because basically they don’t have an agenda to provide health insurance to people at affordable rates.”
Au contraire, Republicans responded.
The 173-member strong Republican Study Committee is on track to roll out legislation this fall that would replace the 2010 Affordable Care Act with a comprehensive alternative, Chairman Steve Scalise told CQ Roll Call on Thursday.
Though it wouldn’t be the first Obamacare repeal-and-replace proposal floated by individual GOP lawmakers in either chamber of Congress, the RSC bill is one that could at least gain traction on the House floor, given the conservative group’s size and influence.
Oh good, it only took four years for House Republicans to come up with a health care plan they like.
So, what’s in it? No one outside the Republican Study Committee actually knows, and even the RSC isn’t altogether sure since the plan isn’t finished. But Scalise, the Louisiana Republican who chairs the RSC, insists some of the popular provisions in “Obamacare” will remain intact, including protections for people with pre-existing conditions.
“We address that to make sure that people with pre-existing conditions cannot be discriminated against,” he told Roll Call. But, he promised the bill would not “put in place mandates that increase the costs of health care and push people out of the insurance that they like,” Scalise said.
In related news, the Republican Study Committee has a weight-loss plan in which everyone eats all the deserts they want and never exercises.
Look, it’s extremely difficult to craft a health care system that protects people with pre-existing conditions while eliminating mandates, scrapping industry regulations, and keeping costs down. Indeed, it’s why Republicans came up with mandates in the first place — the mandates were seen as the lynchpin that made their larger reform efforts work.
Indeed, it’s partly why Democrats used to push so hard to see the GOP alternative. Dems assumed, correctly, that once Republicans got past their talking points and chest-thumping, they’d see that actually solving the problem required provisions that some folks wouldn’t like.
But let’s not pre-judge, right? Maybe the right-wing members of the Republican Study Committee have figured out a creative way to help those who can’t afford coverage and protect those with pre-existing conditions and reduce health care costs and cut the costs for prescription medication and cover preventive care and cut the deficit by hundreds of billions of dollars — just like the Affordable Care Act does. What’s more, maybe they’ll do all of this without raising taxes and/or including elements in the plan that are unpopular.
I seriously doubt it, but I suppose it’s possible.
What seems more likely to me, though, is that the Republican Study Committee will eventually finish and unveil their “Obamacare” alternative and invite side-by-side comparisons between the two approaches — which will in turn make the Affordable Care Act look even better.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, August 13, 2013
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