At Last, the Replacement

In recent months, as their hopes and promises have come crashing down, Obamacare’s champions have fallen back on one last argument in defense of that law: that Republicans have no health-care reform of their own to offer the country.

In fact, various Republican legislators have offered up alternatives to Obamacare. These alternatives all included some good ideas. They were often vulnerable, however, to politically potent criticism. Some of them didn’t do enough about the underlying problems of our health-care-financing system, and so could be characterized as not making coverage sufficiently accessible or affordable; others took bold steps but threatened to disrupt existing employer-provided health coverage.