“The real problem here, in other words, isn’t the lack of flexibility in the health law. It’s the lack of workable ideas from critics on the right.”
From Kaiser Health News:
By Jonathan Cohn, Senior Editor of The New Republic (Mar 01, 2011)
With Republican governors complaining that the Affordable Care Act doesn’t give them enough flexibility, President Barack Obama on Monday offered a compromise: He’d allow them to opt out of the law altogether, just as long as they had an alternative method of providing universal coverage.
Although a few Republican governors responded positively, the party’s more visible leaders were quick to condemn the move as meaningless. “Flexibility,” quipped Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, “I believe the technical legal term is baloney.” Conservative intellectuals agreed. Obama’s proposal is “not an actual concession,” according to National Review’s Yuval Levin, because “it would allow conservative-leaning governors essentially no freedom to move in the direction of greater competition and more consumer-driven health care.”
Hatch, Levin and the other critics of Obama’s proposal have a point: It wouldn’t allow them to enact the sorts of health care reforms they would prefer. But that’s because their proposals wouldn’t come even close to making health care affordable for all Americans. The real problem here, in other words, isn’t the lack of flexibility in the health law. It’s the lack of workable ideas from critics on the right.
Filed under: In the news, Understanding The New Law | Tagged: ACA, Affordable Care Act, Barack Obama, flexibility, GOP governors, Health Care Reform, National Review, Orrin Hatch | Leave a Comment »
