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In her speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Sarah Palin ripped off an old chain email, mangled Doctor Seuss' "Green Eggs and Ham," and declared that “Yes, we can” has become “No, we can’t” under Obamacare. “This is the guy who promised to provide for the sick,” Palin told CPAC attendees, “but there are more uninsured today than when Obama began all of this."

Here are a few things Obamacare can do, has done, and will do, that conservatives can’t and never will.

What Obamacare Can Do (And Is Already Doing)

What Conservatives Can’t or Won’t Do

Conservatives can’t reform health care for the same reason they can’t fix poverty. They don’t want toThey didn’t see anything wrong with the old system, and never made a serious effort to fix it. Conservative economist Tyler Cohen stated it explicitly when he defined the principles of conservative health care reform.

We need to accept the principle that sometimes poor people will die just because they are poor. Some of you don’t like the sound of that, but we already let the wealthy enjoy all sorts of other goods — most importantly status — which lengthen their lives and which the poor enjoy to a much lesser degree. We shouldn’t screw up our health care institutions by being determined to fight inegalitarian principles for one very select set of factors which determine health care outcomes.

Obamacare isn’t perfect. It still leaves 31 million uninsured, because it’s not a universal program. But conservatives don’t have an alternative path to health care reform that even comes close to accomplishing what Obamacare does, because it would run counter to their core ideology. That’s not a “bug” of conservative health policy. It’s a feature.

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