Republican replacement for Obama’s Affordable Care Act? Are you kidding?

For a while, it looked like the Republicans were about to offer their own plan for health care reform, at the very moment the conservative activist Supreme Court knocks it down. That would have given them momentum.

Never mind.

Austerity major Paul Ryan said “no.”

The Examiner: House Budget Committee Chairman Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., on Thursday said Congressional Republicans would not unite around specific legislation to replace President Obama’s national health care law this year, but would instead present an alternative market-based “vision.”

Will Ryan’s “vision” help pay your monthly premium? Will Ryan’s “vision” keep your kid on your family plan till their 26 years old? Will Ryan’s “vision” wipe away the problem of preexisting conditions?

Instead, Ryan is more concerned with a big thumping 2,700 page reform plan, because if it has too many pages...it’ll “thump down on the table.”

“We’re all discussing these contingencies and how we best articulate our vision. I don’t think it’s a good idea to put out some big bill, thump it on the table, that’s thousands of pages and then try ramming it through, because that’s precisely the process that angered the country so much.”

Take your time Paul, what’s the rush, people are just dying? They'll be happy to hear you're going to be “articulating” a vision.

“We do feel obligated to articulate our vision for replace,” Ryan said when asked about the matter during an editorial meeting with the Washington Examiner. “Now, we’ve got nine weeks of session left. Do we want to cram through our own 2,700 page vision? No, that’s what the country hated. But do we believe in patient-centered health care and market-based medicine? A lot of us have put time and effort into this, yeah.”

Market based medicine? What an absolutely draconian and ethically challenged idea. Profit from sick or dying people? Go for it Paul, stall, debate, articulate a vision, and then build in a profit margin.

Though Ryan said Republicans generally agree on goals, they haven’t yet coalesced around a way to get there. “We’ve got lots of them, whether it’s insurance reforms, risk pools and pooling mechanisms, tax treatment of health care – the things we think are necessary to get to the root causes of medical inflation and get the patient-centered system in place. There are different ways of doing it. On tax treatment of health care, some of our folks really like deductions, others like the tax credit route. There are various ways of doing that. I don’t think we’re going to settle specifically on one bill, because there are a lot of people who have different ideas on how to do this. 

Anybody have another ten or twenty years…?