Some promising news on Universal healthcare from the Carpetbagger report.

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October 15, 2007

Universal healthcare: it’s not just for Dems anymore
Posted October 15th, 2007 at 12:35 pm



With the party taking a bit of a beating over its resistance to expanding access to healthcare for low-income children, Republicans on Capitol Hill apparently have a new idea: they’ll introduce a universal healthcare plan of their own.

Under fierce attack by Democrats over the children’s health insurance plan, House Minority Leader John A. Boehner said Sunday Republicans will unveil their own health care plan over the next few months.

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“Republicans are working on a plan that will provide access to all Americans to high quality health insurance, make sure that we increase the quality of insurance that we have in American, and we want to foster a sprit of innovation,” said Boehner on “Fox News Sunday.” “This is a plan we’ll see over the next coming months where we put the patients in charge of their health care.”


It’s obviously too soon to say what features might be included in such a plan, though it’s safe to assume the policy won’t amount to much, won’t actually help the uninsured, and will be structured in such a way as to help the party’s corporate benefactors.

But frankly, I don’t care. The leading Republican in the House is prepared to unveil a plan that will offer universal access to “high-quality health insurance.” Whether the plan stinks is irrelevant — a proposal like this would be a breakthrough.

For years, the notion that Washington could (and should) create a framework whereby all Americans have healthcare coverage was the purview of one side of the aisle: the Dems’ side. Republicans resisted the idea that there was a problem, resisted the idea that officials in DC were responsible for addressing the problem, and resisted any approach predicated on the suggestion that all Americans deserve coverage.

And yet, there was the conservative Republican leader of a conservative Republican caucus on a conservative Republican network bragging about a universal healthcare plan the GOP is going to unveil.

It reminded me of a Kevin Drum post from January, after Arnold Schwarzenegger and Mitt Romney pushed UHC plans of their own.

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Democrats should understand what this means: (a) universal healthcare is no longer some lefty fringe notion, and (b) the plans from Schwarzenegger and Massachusetts’ Mitt Romney are now the starting point for any serious healthcare proposal. Any proposal coming out of a Democratic policy shop should be, at a minimum, considerably more ambitious than what’s on offer from these two Republicans.


Ladies and gentlemen, start your engines.

I’m well aware of the fact that the Republican plans for universal coverage aren’t going to be very good. That’s not the point. It’s more important to realize the big picture — we’ll soon have Dems and Republicans arguing not over whether to have every American insured, but how best to have every American insured.

The state of play is in flux, and it’s shifting in the Dems’ direction.


Well, the devil is always in the details but as I posted above, it certainly looks as if the debate has certainly shifted in the universal health care camp. It'll be interesting to see what Boehner's plan would actually consist of though..