When the actual provisions of the Heritage plan and the ACA are compared, the inclusion of a mandate is about as superficial as both plans including the word "Affordable" in their names.

The idea of a mandate to solve the free-rider problem predates this Heritage paper, and is not particularly unique.

The "free rider problem" is a concept in economics, not a political talking point, I'm sorry you're not more familiar with it.

Others may decide differently.

The comprehensive insurance offered by the ACA does not resemble catastrophic only coverage in the Heritage plan, it's apples and oranges.

The fact that Republicans say it with a sneer is about as meaningful as Republicans saying "Liberal" with a sneer.

outlining how to take down Social Security:
Achieving a Leninist Strategy".

Tactics being pursued ever since.

He ran against mandates for adults and ran the Rovian Harry and Louise ads because he wanted to differentiate himself from Hillary and Edwards (both who supported a mandate) on the subject.

Regardless the Heritage Foundation's mandate was a tax credit.

Obama's is a fine.

These are fundamentally different ways to implement a mandate.

That was on of those "repeat it until it's true" memes.

and Scott Lemieux.

The Heritage plan was the proposal that was going to devastate programs like Medicaid and Medicare.

Since then, Republicans have done everything to undermine Medicare, exploiting the gaps in coverage.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10024270235#post4

see 0:59

Last edited Fri Jan 3, 2014, 09:40 PM - Edit history (1)

The backroom deal to gut the public option and the mandated entrenchment of parasitic middlemen in the system should have been the first clues.

That turned into a public option for people in their 50's. Then no public option at all.

Oh yeah. None.

Who starts negotiating from the end, anyway?

and the OPs attempt (along with the original writer) to portray it otherwise is kinda silly...

are the heritage plan and ACA identical? no. are they super similar? nope.

but is the heritage plan the foundation in which it was built on , for the sake of a 'bipartison' bill that would actually pass?
Yes.

the republicans gave their edited version in the house in the 90s..
then a further revamped edited version in Mass...
then yet another revamped edited version for the ACA...


to say they are the same is definitely going more than too far..
but to act as if there was no influence from republican ideology is ... well.. pretty naïve... IMHO.

it works pretty darn good now. It was a Republican idea and they liked it until it came to be called Obama Care.

Medical bankruptcies are still 50% of all bankruptcies in MA. Of course this only affects the 15% of the population accounting for 85% of health care expenses. And the healthy 85% accounting for 15% of expenses could care less.

It was also passed by veto-proof Democratic majorities, more despite Romney than because of him.

They all share a mandate, but in terms of reform and coverage differ greatly.

"Thirty years later a Republican governor, Mitt Romney, made Nixon's plan the law in Massachusetts. Private insurers couldn't have been happier although many Democrats in the state had hoped for a public system."

...is free to disagree with the facts. Democrats made significant changes to Mitt Romney's proposal. In fact, Romney opposed those changes, and upon signing the bill into law, vetoed them. Romney's vetoes were overturned by the legislature.

As are you.

I wonder if you will remember that "Reich is free to disagree with the facts" the next time you link to him in one of your posts...

Single payer was "perfect", public option was good, and ACA is mediocre at best.

But preexisting conditions are gone, and caps are gone, so there's that.

..... the ACA is just good enough to be worth having. Nothing more and nothing less.

And all of the argument about where is came from is moot and stupid. It is what it is, a small improvement over what we had for some people, a small detraction for others. It does help people that need help (pre-existing conditions) and places a minor burden on some who do not.

My beef with it is that it is uncertain and will remain so for a while. Why? Because it is so lame its constituencies of support are not large enough to protect it. And also it is so overly complex that we won't really know the unintended consequences for many years.

Welcome!

We take one step every generation. It's rediculous, frankly.

And the Republicans have learned an important lesson. They learned that you keep hammering until you win. They will NEVER, NEVER let up on ACA the way they did with SS back in the 30s, and how they half heartedly did with Medicare in the 60s. The ACA will not last a generation, in my opinion. The Republicans have already succeeded in reversing the contraception mandate and the Medicare Expansion mandate. In 2017 they will not let Vermont obtain the waiver for state level single payer.

No one, and I mean NO ONE, has said that the Affordable Care Act was based off the Heritage Foundation's plan. What everyone has said from day one is that the payment vehicle, the individual mandate, was based off the Heritage Foundation's plan. This is true, and the author of this crap piece spends a full paragraph acknowledging it.

Everything else beyond the individual mandate is a product of progressive-minded reforms that are universally popular with the public. None of those are a part of the Heritage Foundation's plan and everyone knows this.

Click bait junk journalism trying to event a fantasy position that he can argue against.

The point of the article (i.e. the OP) is to refute what SOMEone (i.e. Michael Moore, clearly not a NOONE) has publicly (at least 'arguably appeared to have') said.

Not sure why you're denigrating the article here, I think this is a valuable 'rebuttal' of (or at the least provider of context for) what MM has gone out and said.

IOW I don't get your beef. I think it's great, myself.



Not only that, but if what you're saying is true, then why are there so many good Liberals on this very thread ... supporting what Michael Moore said?

The disturbing thing to ME is that Moore has given rhetorical ammo to the Wingnuts. You see, in a few months, the ACA will begin to become known as a rousing success ... and then the tools at Faux, Rush, etc, in their pathetically dishonest and memory-challenged way ... will begin to look for way to take credit for the success.

I can already hear the dipshits I argue with on FB, 6 months from now "Oh, yeah, of COURSE 'ObamaCare' is working ... that cause it's really Heritage/Nixon/ROMNEYCARE! Just look, your libtard hero Michael Moore even SAID SO (link to the same article quoted in the OP)!!!" ... acting like THEY knew all along it was a good idea ...

It was clear that he was referring to the individual mandate when he tied the ACA to the Heritage Foundation.

The ACA is the Individual Mandate plus a whole host of reforms. All (or perhaps the vast majority) of those reforms are good and universally popular, and the individual mandate is, while still an improvement over the prior system, substantially less effective than any other payment vehicle we could have used (public option or NHS). Michael Moore did not attempt to claim that those reforms were from the Heritage Foundation, as this author is alluding.

Some people can't admit that this plan is the insurance industry's wet dream.

fight over single-payer proposed by the Clinton's.

That's why we have this temporary work around. Thank god something passed that can be improved now that logjam is broken.

Applauding and cheering like giddy teenagers. Since Obama claims he basically copied RomneyCare in order to appease Republican... Smells like a heritage plan, no?

Another fate like Hillarycare - - two more decades of nothing - - would have been catastrophic.

Even Bernie Sanders acknowledged ACA was about all that could pass, even though - - at a minimum - - a public option would have made it so much better (although expanded Medicaid as originally envisioned was close to a limited public option).

It was the manure they threw on the wall as part of their attempt to stop Hillary in 2992. But they never actually wanted it to become law. It was just a backstop. Just a red herring. Something to confuse the debate.

That being the case, Romney does deserve some credit for going ahead with that in Massachusetts when he SHARED power with Democrats in one of the most liberal states. It wasn't exactly the most courageous, heroic thing, but it was better than any other Republican did. Too bad he had to be such a dick about it later, rather than owning it. But the voters saw through that.

Defending it is no longer necessary. Let's focus on making it better.

Even Obama admitted this was a republican plan based on the MA model which was based on the Heritage Foundations original plan. All the revisionist history in the world isn't going to change that.

"Based on" the MA model. Obamacare is different from the Republican plan and the only people who think that's propaganda have already convinced themselves that Obama is Republican.

Your opinions are not facts, especially when even those you're somehow trying to protect disagree with you.

easy work"! So easy. Scott Lemieux deconstructs how different it is.. if those who are intent are whining about "it's a republicon plan" would bother to read it.

Soundbytes marinated in lies are so easy to repeat without having to actually see how different ACA is than the heritage plan.. and mitt rmoney wanted to veto the Mass Health Care law. Didn't get it, though, did he?

"It's michael moore.. he must be right "

In December (and all of last year), our son paid $500 a month for COBRA.

In January, thanks to the ACA, he paid $200. A $300 a month difference...not too shabby. If only the Republicans would understand that he will now have $3600 more of disposable income this year to spend at *voila* small (and large) businesses!

Thank you, President Obama and all members of Congress who voted for it.

woo me with reality

around Hillary's neck and named it evil in every possible setting and medium. That's why the inclusion of the mandate is so striking and the idea for a mandate sure did not come from the left. ACA is a lot like Bob Dole's plan, but that's not what's important, what counts is that it is nothing like the Obama campaign plan which had no individual mandate and a strong public option to help contain costs.
When you toss aside your own rhetoric so fully and swiftly, people will question where the new ideas come from, they will note Romney Care, Dole's alternative plan and the other plans with a mandate and without any form of public option for coverage. To think one can carry on like that and never be asked about it or called on it is too stupid to be called hubris.

Lemieux splits hairs until they're unrecognizable, but they're still hairs. After agreeing with most of Moore's criticisms and suggestions for improvement, he disputes the ACA's Heritage Foundation lineage by pointing to the differences between the conservative proposal and the ACA while papering over as insignificant the fundamental similarity that defines the ACA and makes it different from most other industrial democracies' approach to universal access to health care-- the individual mandate to BUY COMMERCIAL HEALTH INSURANCE and insure the profitability of the insurance industry. Yes, perhaps they are "only really alike" in that respect. That is because neither was designed to put patient care first, rather both were designed to maintain corporate profits first-- the ACA includes some mitigating requirements, like the proportion of premiums that must serve patient needs, and elimination of preexisting conditions clauses-- but it is fundamentally similar to the Heritage Foundation's intent to produce a plan that buttressed the status quo in the land of inaccessible health care and to Romneycare, which was presumably thought to improve its bipartisan chances of passage (a serious mistake in my view, since undermining or repealing it has been a partisan republican rallying cry from the very beginning).