The Alternative

The GOP leadership is signaling they're going to unveil their health care reform plan, which won't do you much good if you're looking to improve the insurance you currently have or improve on the insurance you currently don't have. But at least it would be a boondoggle for the health care industrial complex:

Starting with the accurate observation that it’s odd to have insurance regulated fifty different ways in fifty states, the GOP decided not to do the sensible thing and create uniform federal regulation, but instead to let insurers sell plans across state lines. In other words, there’ll be a race to the bottom and all insurance will soon be offered under the rules of whichever state is laxest in its rules—goodbye consumer protections!

The result of all this will be a situation in which the health insurance systems works better for people who don’t need health care services, and much worse for people who actually are sick or who become sick in the future. It’s basically a health un-insurance policy.

The Boehner plan doesn't even bother to prevent insurance companies from denying coverage, which should be a given if moral decency were a factor. Instead, sick people would be dumped into the kind of insurance pools that already exist in roughly 30 states and have proven overwhelmingly ineffective and expensive. But that's because universal coverage is considered a bug and not a feature by Republicans. The GOP is concerned with "cost" of reform -- not with curbing the spiraling "cost" of health care in this country. Through inaction the GOP can merely say, correctly, that they're spending less than Democrats to reform health care.