The GOP's ObamaCare Problem In A Nutshell

You can put this in the "you're really just figuring this shit out now?" category (from Sahil Kapur at TPM):

One congressional GOP health aide, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly, said his party is as determined as ever to fight Obamacare, and will remain so as long as it exhibits failure. He said devising an alternative is fraught with the difficulty of crafting a new benefits structure that doesn't look like the Affordable Care Act.

"If you want to say the further and further this gets down the road, the harder and harder it gets to repeal, that's absolutely true," the aide said. "As far as repeal and replace goes, the problem with replace is that if you really want people to have these new benefits, it looks a hell of a lot like the Affordable Care Act. ... To make something like that work, you have to move in the direction of the ACA. You have to have a participating mechanism, you have to have a mechanism to fund it, you have to have a mechanism to fix parts of the market."

I was just talking to a friend the other day about this exact issue. Republicans keep claiming that they want to "repeal and replace" ObamaCare, but the problem for the GOP is that there are only a limited number of ways to achieve health care reform without creating government-run health insurance. As Kapur noted in his article, there is a reason the Republicans have failed to come up with a replacement for the ACA: "The popular parts of the law, most notably the preexisting conditions guarantee, are unsustainable without unpopular parts like the individual mandate."

But I'm convinced now more than ever that it was never the intent of the GOP to replace ObamaCare.  If the Republicans really thought that the country needed health care reform, they could have pushed it through Congress during the eight years Bush was in office. 

Conservative Bill Kristol, in 1993, wrote a memo wherein he argued that health care reform would be a political disaster for the GOP.  Kristol wrote that a successful Clinton health care bill would "relegitimize middle-class dependence for 'security' on government spending and regulation" and would "revive the reputation of the party that spends and regulates, the Democrats, as the generous protector of middle-class interests."

I guess Kristol's memo explains why Republicans are so violently opposed to the individual health care mandate, even though it was their own idea.  Republicans simply have no interest in being viewed as the generous protector of middle-class interests, and they will do whatever it takes to prevent the Democrats from being viewed that way.