Obamacare is a Conservative Plan

J.D. Kleinke in The Times:

If Mitt Romney’s pivots on President’s Obama’s health care reform act have accelerated to a blur — from repealing on Day 1, to preserving this or that piece, to punting the decision to the states — it is for an odd reason buried beneath two and a half years of Republican political condemnations: the architecture of the Affordable Care Act is based on conservative, not liberal, ideas about individual responsibility and the power of market forces.

This fundamental ideological paradox, drowned out by partisan shouting since before the plan’s passage in 2010, explains why Obamacare has only lukewarm support from many liberals, who wanted a real, not imagined, “government takeover of health care.” It explains why Republicans have been unable since its passage to come up with anything better. And it explains why the law is nearly identical in design to the legislation Mr. Romney passed in Massachusetts while governor. . . .

Not only is the plan conservative in its design, according to current ideologies, it is conservative in the sense that it makes minor adjustments to the status quo rather than attempting a radical overhaul:

The president’s program extends the current health care system — mostly employer-based coverage, administered by commercial health insurers, with care delivered by fee-for-service doctors and hospitals — by removing the biggest obstacles to that system’s functioning like a competitive marketplace.

If Obama is reelected as the polls predict, Republicans will be saved the embarrassment of repealing a bill that embodies their health care goals and trying to design a replacement that would be the same thing while seeming to be something else.