One of the clichés of the moment is that it isn’t 1993: Republicans are going to have a much harder time defeating liberal health-care plans than they did during the Clinton administration. While there is a lot of truth to that statement, let’s not forget that 1993 didn’t look like 1993 at first either. In the fall of that year, as Bill Clinton unveiled his proposal, the leader of the Senate Republicans, Bob Dole, was muttering incomprehensibly about making a deal. Well into the spring of 1994, Sen. Bob Bennett of Utah was saying that Republicans should work with Democrats to pass a health-care bill. Many businessmen favored the idea. It all fell apart anyway.

The Democrats are obsessed with not repeating the errors they made in the 1990s. But their approach to the issue still has serious vulnerabilities. Republicans should make every effort to defeat the plan the Democrats seem likely to propose. They might just succeed.

They should strive to defeat this plan, first and foremost, because it is a bad idea, one that would make American health care more expensive and less innovative. It may very well be an irreversible bad idea. Federal programs, no matter how dysfunctional, are very hard to get rid of.

They should work to defeat the Obama plan, second, because it is an important part of a bad project: bringing social democracy to these shores. Third, they should defeat it because its passage is likely to have the effect of ensconcing liberalism. It seems reasonable to assume that the more dependent they are on government — whether or not they like it — the more Americans will vote for the party of government. Fourth and least, defeating a liberal health bill would be an important tactical victory in the run-up to the 2010 elections.

The fundamental attack on the bill should be obvious: that it will raise middle-class taxes and disrupt the health-insurance arrangements of millions of people for the worse. But Republicans who want to prevail in this fight should be careful not to minimize, or seem to minimize, the flaws in American health care. It is true, as any number of conservative policy analysts have observed, that many of the “46 million uninsured” in this country are uninsured for only a short period of time. But it is also true that even more Americans — as many as 87 million — are uninsured for some portion of the time in any two-year period. That is a lot of people without secure health coverage. Besides, even Americans who have continuous coverage have many justified anxieties about health insurance, from its rising cost to the difficulty of taking it from job to job.

The last role Republicans should want in this debate is that of defenders of the status quo. They have to offer an alternative that makes health insurance more affordable and portable. The Democrats want to portray Republicans as “the party of no” on health care as on the rest of their agenda. Republicans should do all they can to avoid that trap.

To base an alternative on the alleged imperative to achieve “universal coverage” would be a different sort of trap. People can be given tools, such as tax credits, with which to purchase insurance, but they cannot be forced to buy it without an unhealthy increase in government involvement in health care. As Michael F. Cannon explains elsewhere in this issue, a mandate forcing individuals to get insurance would quickly devolve into a disguised pork-barrel program for medical providers, all of whom would want consumers to be forced to get coverage for their wares.

The public supports universal coverage, but that support is an inch deep. The Kaiser Foundation’s polling has shown that people are unwilling to see either their own taxes or the deficit rise in order to finance it. Nor is an individual mandate popular. When people say that they want to achieve a goal but not any of the means to achieve it, they are not all that attached to the goal. Security, portability, and affordability — not universality — should be the goal of health-care reform.

Some Republicans have convinced themselves that a mandate is necessary to keep the uninsured from “free riding.” The theory is that uninsured people get emergency care that forces everyone else’s premiums up. The evidence, though, suggests that this effect is minimal, and that getting rid of it is not worth the costs that a mandate would create. The fiscal motive for a mandate is, indeed, to free-ride off of one subset of the uninsured: young and healthy people. Insurance, particularly the high-end policies that some states require to be the only ones sold, is too pricey to be an attractive deal for them. We should make it a more attractive deal by making insurance cheaper, rather than force them to take a bad deal (even if they did vote for Obama).

Another bad idea on the table is an “employer mandate” that would force employers to cover their employees. Either an employer mandate or an individual mandate is a disguised tax, paid out of workers’ wages. As such it is a sneaky way to evade President Obama’s pledge not to raise taxes on anyone who makes less than $250,000. Republicans ought to say so.

Wages were stagnant even when the economy was booming, largely because of health-care costs. All the more reason to avoid adding to that cost in the middle of a recession. The Democrats will of course claim that their plan is good for the economy because it relieves businesses of health-care costs. But redirecting a portion of wages that currently goes to employer-provided health insurance to go instead to taxes will not make American industry more competitive. Early signs are that the Democratic Congress is not going to push for any serious cost controls, which might (whatever their drawbacks) reduce the burden on wage earners.

Another issue Republicans should raise is abortion. People forget the extent to which controversy over abortion coverage helped sink the Clinton health-care proposal. It is inconceivable that the Democrats would advance a health-care plan that did not include abortion coverage, perhaps in some disguised manner. But taxpayer funding of abortion is unpopular. It may hurt the Democrats more than it did in the early 1990s. Public opinion on abortion has moved rightward since then. Obama has also tried assiduously to position himself as an abortion moderate.

Republicans will be tempted to spend a lot of time complaining about “reconciliation,” the parliamentary maneuver Democrats are likely to use to enable them to pass a health-care bill with a simple majority of the Senate rather than with the 60 votes most legislation requires. But an overemphasis on this issue carries dangers. Most people know little and care less about the fine points of congressional procedure. Republicans should take care not to give the impression that they are more interested in protecting their prerogatives than in improving health care. The focus should be on the flaws of the legislation, with the Democrats’ tactics a subordinate concern. The message, that is, should be that they’re muscling through a disastrous bill.

An asset Republicans ought to use in the fight over health care is the rhetoric that Candidate Obama used in 2008. During the primaries, Hillary Clinton attacked him from the left because his health-care proposal did not attain universal coverage. He countered that it would be wrong to force people to buy insurance they cannot afford. During the fall, he ran ad after ad slamming John McCain’s plan (often dishonestly). His themes were that middle-class taxes should not be raised to pay for health-care reform and that people who like their existing coverage should not be forced to leave it. Since any Democratic plan is going to involve some type of middle-class tax hike and throw millions of people out of their current plans, the president’s past rhetoric can and should be turned against him.

Most health-care lobbies, from insurers to the pharmaceutical companies, want a reform based on universal coverage: It means more customers and more subsidies. The Democrats’ overwhelming power in Washington, D.C., is inducing even industries with misgivings to make nice: They would rather be invited to lunch than be on the menu. Heavily unionized businesses see reform as a way of offloading some of their costs onto the taxpayer. Republicans will not be able to count on interest groups to drive down public support for Obama’s plan.

Instead, Republicans are going to have to persuade millions of Americans that they would be worse off under Obama’s plan — that the Democrats are sacrificing middle-class interests to liberal ideology. A decline in public support will make the interest groups less supportive, peel off moderate Democrats, and make weak-kneed Republican senators less likely to strike a bad deal. It is entirely possible that Obama’s plan will hit its peak popularity the day it is announced. Are Republicans certain to defeat it? Not even close. Is a Republican victory feasible? Yes.