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This is essentially what the “public option” in the original Obamacare proposal was — an opt-in publicly owned insurance company, which would compete with all the other insurers, but not have the overhead of their business models. Unfortunately, it was axed alone with much of the other important aspects of that bill.

The great irony is that the initial Obamacare proposal was a Republican policy — originally proposed in the mid-‘90s as an alternative to the proposal from the Clinton White House, and implemented in Massachusetts by Mitt Romney when he was the governor. The Republican congress and conservative media machine were so invested in seeing Obama fail that they instead branded it socialism and fought it tooth and nail. It would’ve been a fantastic opportunity for a resurgence in bipartisanship in government, and could potentially have averted the subsequent 14 years of animosity and bitter obstructionism. Ah well, so it goes.




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