Tim Noah: The Heritage Foundation disowns its baby: Noted for August 22, 2013
Tim Noah: The Heritage Foundation disowns its baby:
Obamacare is largely Heritage’s own invention…. Look out, donors: the policies you pay Heritage to develop today may be policies you pay Heritage to defeat tomorrow…. Dr. Frankenstein is Stuart Butler, then director of domestic policy research at Heritage and, since 2010, director of Heritage’s Center For Policy Innovation. (No, they didn’t fire him.)… Butler wrote a 1989 pamphlet titled A National Health System For America in collaboration with Edmund Haislmaier (then a health care policy analyst at Heritage and now a senior research fellow there—no, they didn’t fire him, either). The pamphlet is not currently available on Heritage’s Web site…. In the lecture, Butler repeatedly called his proposal “the Heritage plan”…. Under Butler’s (whoops, make that Heritage’s) scheme, everyone would have to purchase his or her own health insurance. Butler proposed a consumer-choice system in which the government “set broad rules of the ‘game,’” and the context strongly suggested that by “government” Butler meant “federal government.”… When Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney was putting together a state-level health reform plan that was another model for Obamacare, Heritage “helped us construct an exchange,” according to Romney’s 2010 book, No Apology…. Heritage denies that it ever favored a health plan that remotely resembled Obamacare. Conceding this point too conspicuously would compromise its splashy campaign to defeat Obamacare by any means necessary. How can Obamacare be the work of the devil if much of that work was done at Heritage? A subject, perhaps, for future scholarly inquiry.
