Avik Roy has done the unthinkable. In a recent op-ed title he used “conservative’s case” and “universal healthcare” in the same sentence. And bridged these disparate words by the preposition for.
Spoiler alert: Roy has asked Republicans to embrace universal healthcare.
The Twitterverse is abuzz. An angry Gary P. Jackson, a self-affirmed conservative, tweeted:
“there is NEVER a conservative case for Marxism….especially Universal healthcare.”
Stated differently, universal healthcare is the worst form of Marxism except for all other forms of Marxism.
Thus far Roy has not been asked to produce his birth certificate, which is just as well. Roy, a prolific Forbes columnist and a scholar at the Manhattan Institute, was healthcare policy adviser to Mitt Romney. He is not a cheerleader of the Affordable Care Act.
There are things one may disagree with Roy. However, his short treatise, How Medicaid Fails the Poor, was impressive, as it deftly dealt with Medicaid’s structural problems. That a right-of-center policy analyst would write a book with that title is one of the many ironies I am now accustomed to encountering (the other delicious irony was the love of Cadillac health plans by unions).
In The Washington Examiner and National Review Online, Roy urges conservatives to acknowledge and embrace universal healthcare, in no uncertain terms:
“…[conservatives] have to agree that universal coverage is a morally worthy goal.”
The arguments put forward by Roy are pure common sense. No one objects to public education as “socialized education.” If conservatives are afraid that universal healthcare means big government, government is already heavily involved in healthcare.
And not just Medicare, which a certain tea party placard asked the government to keep its hands off!
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