How the Left Has Become the Right in America, and the Right Has Gone Nutty-Right

It is really sad when a creep to the right by the left wing party in a nation means that in roughly 20 years it implements previously right wing policies and get attacked as being "too left" for doing that.

Here is a Paul Krugman post to his NY Times blog pointing out the true history of "Obamacare":

Conservative Origins of Obamacare

Here’s a useful resource for tracking the history of the ideas embodied in the Affordable Care Act.

The essence of Obamacare, as of Romneycare, is a three-legged stool of regulation and subsidies: community rating requiring insurers to make the same policies available to everyone regardless of health status; an individual mandate, requiring everyone to purchase insurance, so that healthy people don’t opt out; and subsidies to keep insurance affordable for those with lower incomes.

The original Heritage plan from 1989 had all these features.

These days, Heritage strives mightily to deny the obvious; it picks at essentially minor differences between what it used to advocate and the plan Democrats actually passed, and tries to make them seem like a big deal. But this is disinformation. The essential features of the ACA — above all, the mandate — are ideas Republicans used to support.

The political right in the US has now moved further right from conservative and cranky right wing to kooky and insane right wing politics.