What a conservative blogger has to say

I found this the other day after being linked from another blog. Interesting enough this article comes from a right-wing blogger. I was interested to see how they are covering (and in another sense, recovering from) the fallout from the passage of healthcare reform in the U.S.

I expected anger, frustration, and curses of ill-will. Instead, I found (at least with this blogger) a lot of rationality, melancholy and contemplation over what went wrong. While I don't agree with many of his ideas, I appreciated the serious nature and mature discussion he brought along with them.

The blogger, named Patrick Ruffini, explains that the Republican's failure lied not their inability to prevent healthcare passage, but in failing to put forth comprehensive ideas on how to fix the broken healthcare system. He believes that the Republicans' typical hands-off approach to social/private matters prevented them from framing the debate in a way that resonated with their congressmen and the American people.

He writes:

We have tried ineffectively to stretch free market rhetoric to health care without appreciating that health care is already too far removed from a free market for the analogy to make sense. Real markets are sensitive to price. Health care isn't.

I believe this is a central component to why Republicans were unable to put forth salient ideas in the healthcare debate. Because they were inexperienced with combining their party's ideals with a social problem, they fell short of being able to solve the central issues.

He continues:

Republican inattention to health care and the failure to develop a compelling free market narrative [...] led to the place we are now. By pounding home the notion that the uninsured were the central problem with the health care system, and [...] their numbers were growing each and every year, liberals built a sense of urgency that conservatives didn't have and were able to demand action

Although I disagree that this "sense" of urgency was just that, and not an actual urgency for healthcare reform, I understand the fundamentals of his stance. The Democrats capitalized on a national crisis, and the Republican's inability to deal with the same crisis put them at a disadvantage.

Here is where he becomes a little misguided though:

A well-developed Republican health reform effort could have addressed the high cost of health care -- actually the most glaring issue in our system -- in a way that would have served as a kind of tax cut for the already insured. And in lowering costs, we could have covered the people who wanted health care but couldn't afford it -- the nub of the uninsured problem.

I don't know how tax cuts for the insured would have somehow given the federal government more money to cover the uninsured. As far as I know, tax cuts take away money from the federal government. Also, he's clearly missing the fact that the cost of health insurance was not solely the reason people were uninsured. Two words: pre-existing conditions. Dropped coverage. Many Americans could afford healthcare (or, well, sorta) but were unable to purchase insurance due to underlying health issues or scams by insurance agencies. Furthermore, even when people did have insurance, many were underinsured and did not have the full coverage that they needed. Simply making health insurance cheaper would not have solved the problem, and neither would basic tax cuts for the insured have led to coverage for all. That's just flawed logic.