Nothing new here, but UCLA historian Albion M. Urdank reminds us of the conservative origin of President Obama’s healthcare legislation.
The irony of Mr Romney and the Republican party’s current hostility to Obamacare lie not so much in the fact that it was modelled on Mr Romney’s own record as healthcare reformer, but that it based itself on the conservative Heritage Foundation proposal of 1989, which became the basis of Republican congressional policy in the early 1990s in the fight against the Clinton administration’s single payer approach.
Republicans often accuse Mr Obama of being hyper-partisan on this issue but by adopting the individual mandate, contained in Romneycare and in the Heritage Foundation prescription, and by abandoning the public-option alternative of the Democratic left, which appeared in the draft legislation for the Affordable Health Care Act, Mr Obama went the extra mile to achieve consensus.
Albion M. Urdank, “Obamacare was based on Republican policy from the 1990s“, letter to the editor, Financial Times, 13 September 2012.
The Heritage Foundation connection is important, because Mitt Romney’s conservative credentials are often questioned.
