But, oddly enough, both have had a share in creating Government-run health care plans.
Here’s part of an article by Jonathan Cohn called Another Signpost on the Road to the Right:
For a long time, the debate between left and right was about how to design the welfare state, not about whether to have one. Conservatives wanted to scale it down and deliver services through the private sector, rather than government, but they accepted the idea that society had some obligation
to provide certain services and supports.
The consensus was already eroding by the 1990s, when Newt Gingrich famously called for letting Medicare “wither on the vine.” But the consensus still had power as recently as the last decade, when the Bush Administration created Medicare Part D. That program gave seniors prescription drug coverage, as liberals had long advocated, but it offered less generous benefits than liberals wanted and channeled coverage through private insurers rather than government. (It also didn’t pay for itself, but that has frustrated liberals as much as, if not more than, it has conservatives.)
It’s hard to imagine today’s Republicans endorsing anything like Part D.
Cohn describes the position of Michael Leavitt, the former Utah governor and former Secretary of Health and Human Services under President George W. Bush, who has been put in charge of Romney’s transition team.
The editorial page of the conservative Washington Examiner called Leavitt’s place in the Romney heirarchy a “red flag.”
Read the article and find out WHY.
