Will Obamacare succeed where term limits failed?

[Lemur]

There have been Republican proposals.

I appreciate that you can say that with a straight face. Yes, proposals were made, especially around the time Obamacare was being introduced. No, none of them were serious, or intended to do anything but prolong the status quo. (The more recent proposals are ... well, read for yourself.)

The "Heritage Plan" never had widespread support among conservatives. If it had, something like it would have passed when the GOP had control of congress and the White House.

So let's see what sorts of "reforms" the Republicans passed when they had control of the Federal government ... hmmm ... would it look like a massive, unfunded giveaway to seniors and the Pharma industry? Is that the sort of conservative reform we can look forward to?

That's the problem with trying something new/innovative. There is no proven track record.

Two thoughts:

(1) Basing national healthcare on principals and ideology that you self-describe as having "no proven track record" in this context is literally playing with people's lives. If the line where free-market absolutism meets reality is not as smooth as you believe it to be, you will get people killed for your grand theory. (And in such an occurrence you would probably argue that we just didn't apply Free-Market-Everything perfectly or purely enough; after all, a Sacred Truth cannot be wrong, it can only be wrongly applied.) Hence my repeated comparisons to communism in this thread. There really is a disturbing and precise parallel.

(2) Advocates of large-scale, untested, unproven new applications of ideology cannot ever be described as "conservative," unless we want to throw the English language under a large fleet of buses. The correct term is radical.