While Republicans in Congress have fully embraced a "repeal and replace" strategy on the Obama health law, there is still no specific GOP plan on what changes should be made to the President's health reform plans.
"We in the House have positive solutions to all of the challenges that we face in the area of health care that don’t require putting Washington in charge," wrote Rep. Tom Price (R-GA) in a fund raising appeal issued Tuesday by the GOP.
But while Price and other lawmakers have most certainly put forward a number of ideas on health reform, Republican leaders in the Congress have held back on cobbling together their own version of the Obama health law.
Back in January of 2011, that was a prime goal, as the House approved a Republican resolution that ordered key committees to report out legislation which would "replace" the Obama health law.
Here is the exact legislative language from last year, when the GOP set out these 13 bullet points on health reform:
(1) foster economic growth and private sector job creation by eliminating job-killing policies and regulations;
(2) lower health care premiums through increased competition and choice;
(3) preserve a patient's ability to keep his or her health plan if he or she likes it;
(4) provide people with pre-existing conditions access to affordable health coverage;
(5) reform the medical liability system to reduce unnecessary and wasteful health care spending;
(6) increase the number of insured Americans;
(7) protect the doctor-patient relationship;
(8) provide the States greater flexibility to administer Medicaid programs;
(9) expand incentives to encourage personal responsibility for health care coverage and costs;
(10) prohibit taxpayer funding of abortions and provide conscience protections for health care providers;
(11) eliminate duplicative government programs and wasteful spending;
(12) do not accelerate the insolvency of entitlement programs or increase the tax burden on Americans; or
(13) enact a permanent fix to the flawed Medicare sustainable growth rate formula used to determine physician payments under title XVIII of the Social Security Act to preserve health care for the nation's seniors and to provide a stable environment for physicians.
You can see that Republicans do have a number of ideas on what they would like to do in health reform - but as the House votes again Wednesday on repeal of the Obama health law, the GOP has not brought up a comprehensive package of plans to "replace" that law.
In debate on the House floor on Tuesday, Democrats repeatedly mocked GOP lawmakers for only offering up a repeal bill, and not anything to take its place.
"What are you for?" asked Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-CA).
"Where is your plan?" Eshoo said while staring down the Republican side of the aisle.
Like a lot of other things, Republicans say that will wait until after the November elections.
Finally - one thing about how many times the House has voted to repeal the Obama health law. Lots of lawmakers and news organizations are reporting that this will be the 31st or 33rd time that the House has voted for repeal - I beg to differ.
Yes, there have been a number of efforts by Republicans to repeal different parts of the health reform law; but when it comes to an actual vote to repeal the whole law, I can only find one other example, back in January of 2011, when the new GOP-led House made it one of the first big votes of the 112th Congress.
