2017-06-29 – The GOP spent 7 years training you to hate their own health plan, and now they are stuck.

I don’t mean this ironically. I mean this literally.

For years the divide between the Democratic and Republican visions of national health insurance was that the Democrats advocated for a single-payer system and the Republican advocated for a so-called “free-market” system. (I put free-market in quotes because there’s nothing really free about our monopolistic health care system, but I’ll save that discussion for another day.)

So when President Obama decided to push of a national health insurance system, he basically said “have it your way” to the Republicans. And he passed the Republican plan.

The Republicans didn’t like it. A Democratic president stole their idea and made it into law. For some, it was even worse: a black man stole their idea.

So they began to run it down. In every campaign and between campaigns they pounded us with one message. Obamacare is a catastrophe and they were going to repeal it.

Health insurance is really complicated. It has lots of moving parts. It has even more parts if you’re talking about a so-called “free-market” plan.

So when Republicans finally get the stage to present their plan—well, their plan was stolen. They don’t have a backup. So they tinker with the stolen plan (i.e., Obamacare). And while Obamacare is far from perfect, a lot of the complicated details were worked out. Chances are that random fiddling would make the plan worse, not better.

And that’s what has happened.

They’ve sold everyone (at least themselves) on the idea that Obamacare is worse than Islam. And so they can’t just step away and try to look at Obamacare for what it was: a win for the Republican vision of health care.

And so they are trying to tear their own plan down.

Fortunately, there are signs that the citizens are beginning to catch on.