Quote:
Originally Posted by SportsJunky
Admittedly, I haven't been paying proper attention to this issue but isn't the basic structure of "Obama care' taken from Mitt Romney's plan?
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A brief history on the law that is now colloquially known as "Obamacare":
Back in the early 1990s, during Bill Clinton's first term, Hillary was put in charge of a task force to fix American healthcare. She was a strong proponent for a universal single-payer system like those used in every other Western democracy, but "Hillarycare" was fiercely opposed by the Republicans in Congress led by Newt Gingrich. The Republicans' compromise on healthcare reform was to propose a market-based approach where every American was mandated to either have employer-provided health insurance or to purchase insurance privately. The reason it had to be mandatory rather than opt-in is because if insurance was optional, nobody would buy it until they became sick and required coverage. Because health insurance would be mandatory for everyone, this proposed system would allow citizens with so-called "pre-existing conditions", who would otherwise be denied coverage because the insurers know they would be unprofitable customers, to have access to health insurance through market exchanges.
Ultimately, the Clintons failed to achieve healthcare reform during Bill's presidency, and the issue fell on the back burner. Several years later, Mitt Romney, then the Republican Governor of Massachusetts, passed a law in his state that basically took the Republican counter-proposal to "Hillarycare" and adopted it at the state level.
When Obama was elected president, reforming healthcare was one of his priorities. Knowing he'd need bi-partisan support from Congress, instead of trying to pass a single-payer universal system favoured by his own party, he instead opted for (what he thought) would be a proposal more acceptable to Republicans. The Affordable Care Act (aka "Obamacare") is almost identical to the Republicans' own proposal for healthcare reform from the 90s that was successfully implemented by Mitt Romney in Massachusetts.
I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to determine why the GOP is so hostile to a bill that they themselves once championed as an acceptable alternative to a national universal healthcare system.