Heritage Foundations je najbolj glasen desničarski kvazi think-tank v ZDA, v bistvu pa plačan republikanski spin maker. Pod krinko libertarnosti prodaja najbolj vulgarno verzijo free-market filozofije. Svojo filozofijo seveda na veliko izvaža v “nove demokracije”, tudi v Sloveniji je financirala nekaj projektov in skupin. Trenutno pa Heritage vodi zelo široko kampanjo proti zdravstveni reformi v ZDA, imenovano Obamacare. Pri tem niza kup “argumentov” proti reformi: da je draga, da bo povzročila dvig davkov, da zajeda v osebne svoboščine posameznikov, na prvem mestu pa je seveda to, da mora biti zdravstvena reforma utemeljena na tržnih pravilih. No, nerodno je, da je Heritage povsem podobno reformo, proti kateri se danes bojuje z vsemi sredstvi, propagirala kot svoj predlog že leta 1989. Danes se svojega otroka sramuje. Predlog je izginil z njihove spletne strani.

Butler wrote a 1989 pamphlet titled A National Health System For America in collaboration with Edmund Haislmaier (then a health care policy analyst at Heritage and now a senior research fellow there—no, they didn’t fire him, either). The pamphlet is not currently available on Heritage’s Web site (it can be purchased online), but a 1989 lecture by Butler (“Assuring Affordable Healthcare For All Americans”) is, and a more readable version is available on the Web site HealthCareReform.ProCon.org.

In the lecture, Butler said:

Many states now require passengers in automobiles to wear seatbelts for their own protection. Many others require anybody driving a car to have liability insurance. But neither the federal government nor any state requires all households to protect themselves from the potentially catastrophic costs of a serious accident or illness. Under the Heritage plan, there would be such a requirement.

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In the lecture, Butler repeatedly called his proposal “the Heritage plan”– not “my plan.” He elaborated these ideas in a 1990 backgrounder and in a 1993 paper titled “Why Conservatives Need A National Health Plan.”

In none of these writings did Butler make explicit mention of government-run insurance exchanges. But Butler favored severing health insurance entirely from the workplace—a good idea that was too far left for Obama to favor—by eliminating the tax deduction that employers receive for it.

Under Butler’s (whoops, make that Heritage’s) scheme, everyone would have to purchase his or her own health insurance. Butler proposed a consumer-choice system in which the government “set broad rules of the ‘game,’” and the context strongly suggested that by “government” Butler meant “federal government.”

That sounds an awful lot like insurance exchanges, which President Obama has used similar language to describe. Butler also mentioned as one model the Federal Health Employee Benefits Program, which was one model for Obamacare. A decade later, when Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney was putting together a state-level health reform plan that was another model for Obamacare, Heritage “helped us construct an exchange,” according to Romney’s 2010 book, No Apology.

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Mainly, though, Heritage denies that it ever favored a health plan that remotely resembled Obamacare. Conceding this point too conspicuously would compromise its splashy campaign to defeat Obamacare by any means necessary. How can Obamacare be the work of the devil if much of that work was done at Heritage? A subject, perhaps, for future scholarly inquiry.

Vir: Timothy Noah, MSNBC