The Heritage Foundation created Obamacare, which was the perfect solution for people who wanted to maintain a profit-oriented healthcare system. It's a friggin' *marketplace* for health insurers run by the government. It should be a wet dream for conservatives and would have remained so if a brown man hadn't become its main proponent.
Conservatives were excited about it when Mitt Romney implemented it as Romneycare. Conservatives need to ask honestly themselves why they turned against it when Obama became its sponsor.
The reason they haven't been able to develop an alternative is that THERE IS NO alternative that can satisfy the profit motive. It is a bourse run by the government. It is, quite literally, impossible to improve upon it within the scope of the profit motive (except perhaps by re-introducing the mandate, which was part of the original Heritage Foundation’s proposal).
These kinds of contradictions were further enhanced by Trump, who reached into populist angst and rejected conservative economic thinking. Government debt became something for other people to worry about. All the fidgeting about it by conservative economists became muted by Trump's borrowing mantra.
And we can't solely blame Trump for this.
George W. Bush launched an interventionist, and illegal, invasion of Iraq on the government credit card that has still not been paid. Congress never passed a budgetary mechanism to pay for that war. 100,000+ Iraqis were killed with borrowed money.
Conservative ideology is impossible for people to follow because it doesn't exist anywhere but the occasional Twitter feed and some hidden screeds at so-called think tanks.
Their policy is to lower taxes but spend like crazy.
Even the supposed resistance to big government is filled with contradiction. It only applies when it is convenient. Southern red states are the biggest consumers of welfare, and they are the first to beg for FEMA money when disaster strikes. Anti-immigrants want federal funds for big border walls.
Meanwhile, in the Senate, Democratic senators were representing at least 20,314,962 more people than their Republican counterparts BEFORE the Georgia elections because of the overrepresentation of rural voters in the U.S. electoral system. Source: https://www.vox.com/2020/11/6/21550979/senate-malapportionment-20-million-democrats-republicans-supreme-court
Biden won by 7 million votes, but if about 40,000 votes had switched in key states, Trump would have won the electoral vote anyway.
So conservatism rides on this perverse electoral advantage and gets away with its contradictions because of these advantages, and its appeal to fear, and a persistent promise to cut your taxes while continuing to spend money like a kid in a toy store.
