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Republicans Claim They Have a Healthcare Plan. But They Won't Tell You What's in It
(www.rollingstone.com)
this post was submitted on 02 Nov 2025
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They've been trying to tell us they have this secret plan since the ACA passed in 2010. Fifteen years of swearing up and down that it's some great plan that will help everyone, maybe including poor people if they think it'll help convince anyone but definitely including insurance companies and pharmaceutical giants.
The problem is, the ACA was already their idea. The 2006 Massachusetts law that he proposed and signed into law as governor was an early version of Obamacare, including the Individual Mandate and a penalty for businesses that didn't provide insurance to their employees. It was a stopgap measure to overhaul the system so that patients wouldn't use the ER for health care and run up huge unpaid bills when they could just pay for the care from the correct provider; but unintentionally, it also got 98% of Massachusetts residents insured.
But by the time Romney started campaigning for president in 2012, the GOP had already started moving dramatically to the right, to the point where this lukewarm, milquetoast excuse for a solution was seen as radical. And since the GOP can't risk doing something that will reduce their voters' hardship (because paradoxically then they might stop voting for them), they are terrified of coming up with anything that might actually help.
And the Romney plan was based on the Republican counter offer when Bill Clinton was trying to get universal health care passed. Clinton rejected it as not good enough.
And Hillary's plan was a convoluted, compromised, unworkable mess. She took universal healthcare off the table as soon as she started.
So we got nothing from that half-assed effort, which was exactly what the predatory for-profit health-demial industry wanted. Fuck Republicans and fuck centrists.
And he was right. Still, I wonder how things would've been different had Clinton accepted the counteroffer and tried to iterate on it afterwards. The 2004-and-beyond GOP playbook has been to keep the Republican base spiked with anxiety and fear, blame Democrats for it, and use that cortisol to bring out the vote; but if the fear and anxiety about health care had been toned down and reduced their overall fear, maybe maga would've had more trouble gaining traction.
Or maybe it would've been successfully repealed in 2016. Who knows.
Nah, we still would have had 9/11, which is unrelated to healthcare and was the catalyst for making the endless fear mongering being ramped up to overdrive.
Get everyone primed up on hating "Middle Easterners" genericly, normalize more.and more surveilence and errosion of rigbts in the name of protecrion, start strapping in other groups to hate as people lose interest.
Probably. I mean, I'm super interested in alternate history as a storytelling concept, but I recognize that it's probably not a super helpful thing to get caught up in unless you're actively looking for fiction. The Butterfly Effect is just too strong to be certain about anything.
Would 9/11 have actually happened? Or is there someone who died in 1999 due to lack of healthcare access who might've been able to stop it, had the ACA come a decade earlier? If 9/11 is a "canon event" a la Spider-verse, would having a few years where the political "heat" was a bit lower first have helped us maintain that solidarity that was so brief in our actual version of history? Would history have proceeded more or less as it did in reality, but with Republicans abandoning their attempts to kill health care in the late-00s because by that point it was too established and "from the before times?" Would they have replaced those legislative attacks with something worse? (Almost certainly yes)
I'm intrigued by the possibilities. To some extent because we can learn for the future by thinking about the past; but mostly just in a "huh, that's interesting" way.