Jon Cohn: “Yes, let’s talk about those Republican ideas for health care.”

The only thing that could be more destructive to America than the “Party of No” is a party with these “conservative” ideas.

Clipped from www.tnr.com

The idea that Republicans haven’t had a chance to present their ideas on health care reform is a bit mind-boggling. Five separate congressional committees had hearings; each chamber had floor debates. That’s hundreds of hours the GOP had to talk about health care, all of it in public view and televised on C-SPAN.

Republicans boast that the Roadmap is serious plan to get the federal budget under control, which turns out to be a fairly large exaggeration. As Howard Gleckman of the Tax Policy Center has observed, the Roadmap doesn’t account for trillions of dollars in lost revenue from its tax cuts. Yes, that’s trillions with a “t” at the front and “s” at the back.

As a preliminary (and still unpublished) analysis of the Roadmap by the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities concluded, “elderly and disabled people with significant medical conditions could encounter serous difficulty securing adequate coverage.”