Uwe Reinhardt: Talmudic-Like Studies of Republican Health Reform Ideas: Noted for August 19, 2013
Uwe Reinhart: Talmudic-Like Studies of Republican Health Reform Ideas: THE FRONT PAGE
After doing Talmudic-like studies of the doctrines on health reform promulgated by Republican health-policy makers and the conservative economists who inspired them during the past two decades, I am devastated to discover that all of those studies have been for naught. We are now told, sometimes by the same prophets of yore, that these doctrines were not only wrong, but outright heretical, which in this context means un-American. New doctrines are rumored to be in the making, but the first word on them has yet to be committed to new, sacred tablets, mainly because there have not yet emerged any new ideas…. Newt Gingrich, one of the Grand Old Party’s aging prophets, said so himself…. What is a befuddled immigrant to the United States like me, eagerly trying to become a right thinking American, to make of it all? My early introduction to the texts coming from conservative thinking on health reform was the Heritage Plan of 1989, Viewed through the prism of the ACA of 2010, its language seems eerily familiar…. So what are we to make of the spectacle of Republican anti-Obamacare insurgents, busily fielding hit-and-run attacks against sections of the very sacred tracts that their own prophets had promulgated as principles during the past 20 years? On what principles, new or old, are these hit-and-run raids conducted?…
But history tells us that there is always hope. Eons ago the twelve tribes of Israel, under the leadership of Moses, reportedly were lost in the Sinai desert, in a random walkabout of some 40 years. A possibly apocryphal rumor has it that eventually an exasperated Mrs. Moses stamped her besandaled foot in the sand and shouted “I have had it with your leadership, Moses! I’m going to ask for directions.” And so she did, and so they got to the promised land. Perhaps some day someone in the Republican Party will ask for coherent, principled directions on health policy – and this time follow these directions. Perhaps.
