DeMint: Shift to shutdown strategy because every vote to overturn Obamacare costs taxpayers $1.75M

Tuesday, September 17, 2013

DeMint: Shift to shutdown strategy because every vote to overturn Obamacare costs taxpayers $1.75M

United States Capitol, Washington, D.C., USA Poco a poco

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MedCity News

September 14, 2013 1:46 am by Lease, Daryl

At long last, Republicans have presented an alternative to the Affordable Health Care Act: DeMintcare.
No, it's not an herbal remedy involving mint. Or the removal of mint. It doesn't even involve care, actually.
But -- bless 'em -- it's a plan. For that, we should all be grateful.
The man with the plan is Jim DeMint, a Republican from South Carolina who left the U.S. Senate at the start of the year to become president of the Heritage Foundation. (Bigger office, apparently.)
Heritage, you'll recall, is the conservative think tank that first proposed the basic framework for today's health care reform and loved, loved, loved it when it was implemented in Massachusetts as Romneycare.
But when it became Obamacare -- not so much.
DeMint recently elaborated on the intricate nature of this not loving, loving, loving it anymore.
"I cannot think of anything that's more un-American than national government-run health care," he said. "Those who believe in those principles of socialism and collectivism we've seen over the centuries, they see as their holy grail taking control of the health care system."
To reiterate, the basic design of this grail wasn't anything that came from a collective operating at the Heritage Foundation.
When the thinkers at that think tank proposed the framework -- the "individual mandate," requiring insurance for everyone -- it was sound, fiscal policy. When it re-emerged from the White House, it was something vaguely Kenyan.
So, what does DeMint propose as an alternative?