By Matt Holdridge
From Politifact.com:
Democrats like to parry Republican criticism of the recently passed health care law by talking about how it includes ideas that originated with conservatives. During an interview on NBC’s Today show on March 30, 2010, President Barack Obama offered a specific example.
Obama told host Matt Lauer that “when you actually look at the bill itself, it incorporates all sorts of Republican ideas. I mean a lot of commentators have said this is sort of similar to the bill that Mitt Romney, the Republican governor and now presidential candidate, passed in Massachusetts. A lot of the ideas in terms of the exchange, just being able to pool and improve the purchasing power of individuals in the insurance market, that originated from the Heritage Foundation. …”
We zeroed in on the notion that the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that is no fan of Obama’s health care law as a whole, might have “originated” the idea of the health insurance exchange — a virtual marketplace where individuals can purchase health insurance. Our interest only grew after we received an e-mail from Heritage president Ed Feulner that blasted Obama’s claim.
After analyzing the facts, the conclusion,
We agree with Heritage that the differences between its original vision and the version enacted into law are not trivial, and are enough to undercut the president’s effort to secure a Heritage Foundation seal of approval for his bill. But the president helped his case by wording his statement with extreme care. Intentionally or not, he gave himself subtle linguistic running room by saying that “a lot of the ideas” for the exchange came from Heritage, including the concept of “just being able to pool and improve the purchasing power of individuals in the insurance market.” Even if not all of the ideas in the two plans are identical, we feel that it was fair of him to say that “a lot of the ideas” are in common, including the notion of pooling. So we conclude that the president’s statement qualifies as Mostly True.
Dan McCarthy, senior editor of the American Conservative magazine and C4L contributor, put it this way,
“Every think tank on the left and right knows that its recommendations will undergo some deformation before they make their way into law, if they ever do,” McCarthy told PolitiFact. “Heritage might prefer state insurance exchanges with greater individual choice, including for workers already covered by their employers. But I don’t imagine Ed Feulner would be complaining at all if a Republican president or a Republican Congress had passed a plan that deviated from the Heritage blueprint to the same degree that Obama’s bill has. While it’s not true that ‘lots of’ the specifics in the Obama plan were dreamed up by Heritage, the overall approach is similar to policies Heritage has long championed, including the individual mandate as well as the insurance exchanges. This is only controversial because the wrong party happened to pass the law, and it’s poison for any conservative to be identified with it.”
What do you think? Do many on the right only have “sour grapes” because it wasn’t them who passed the sweeping health care reform bill?