Coming Soon: GOPamaCare?

Michelle Malkin warns that Republicans are poised to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, should the Supreme Court overturn ObamaCare. She provides a few specific examples:

GOP Sen. Roy Blunt of Missouri, vice chair of the Senate GOP Conference, told a St. Louis radio station two weeks ago that he supports keeping at least three Obamacare regulatory pillars: federally imposed coverage of "children" up to age 26 on their parents' health insurance policies (the infamous, unfunded "slacker mandate"), federally mandated coverage regardless of pre-existing conditions ("guaranteed issue," which leads to an adverse-selection death spiral) and closure of the coverage gap in the massive Bush-backed Medicare drug entitlement (the "donut hole fix" that will obliterate the program's cost-controls).

Some Republicans are even trying to out-Obama Obamacare. GOP Rep. Steve Stivers of Ohio is pushing a proposal to increase the mandatory coverage age for dependents to age 31. And once a fire-breathing dragon for repeal, GOP Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee hem-hawed when asked by the liberal Talking Points Memo website whether Republicans would be introducing specific bills to preserve the guaranteed issue and slacker mandate provisions.

Even Republicans like Jim DeMint, whom Malkin describes as having "his head screwed on straight", are attacking the wrong problem ("coverage" instead of freedom in her example) or conceding the moral high ground. DeMint indicates that the "slacker mandate" results in lost coverage, which is true and worth bringing up. However, I don't think anyone is asking the question John Stossel recently asked: "Why should government be involved in medicine at all?" Nor is anyone in the GOP speaking indignantly of the immorality of the government dictating how people are to acquire the medical care they need or how physicians are to practice their own livelihoods.

It is only when we start putting politicians in office who ask such fundamental questions and make such principled stands will we really win the battle against centrally "planned" medicine.

-- CAV