Registered Voter:
"More spin. The typical "No" vote. How original. Practiced heavily by the other party during the last 8 years - now they use it to try and paint it as if the Republicans just walked away from serious negotiations on health care and other topics. You all are so full of shit you can't even smell it any more."
Oh please, you mean to say the Republicans actually had the NATION's best interests in mind when they were "negotiating" on the health care legislation?
The Republican party's entire technique was stalling and posturing, lying to the public about the details (death panels and the like), disruption of legitimate conversation with public, (Joe Wilson and the town hall meetings), and lying to the public about bill's impact on the deficit (the bill will decrease the deficit.)
And if you dispute the last fact read the CBO report:
"CBO and JCT now estimate that the legislation would yield a net reduction in deficits of $138 billion over the 10-year period."
http://cboblog.cbo.gov/?p=428
If you don't trust the CBO, then find me a better source.
The Republican Party supported a national health insurance plan with McCain in 2008, read more about it here:
http://money.cnn.com/2008/03/10/news/economy/tully_healthcare.fortune/
Many aspects of the heath care bills passed in congress are included in the McCain plan, for example, McCain supports taxing heath care benefits as a way to pay for subsidized insurance for the poor-
"Say you're earning $100,000 a year and your company provides about $9,000 toward your $12,000 family premium, which is about average. Today you're taxed only on the $100,000. Under McCain's plan, you'd also pay on the $9,000. That could mean an extra $3,000 or so in federal taxes alone. To compensate for the extra levy, McCain would provide a $2,500 federal tax rebate for individuals and $5,000 per family, meaning a family would simply subtract $5,000 from its tax bill, the equivalent of a big cash payment."
"To his credit, McCain does have a plan for relatively young, low-income Americans who can't afford insurance. "We would increase the tax credit according to income so that poor families could buy insurance," says Douglas Holtz-Eakin, McCain's policy director."
So, in conclusions, the Republicans could have supported the aspects of reform they wanted enacted. If they had agreed to work with the Democrats both perspectives could have been included in the final bill, and the reform legislation could have still worked.
Unfortunately, they refused to support any part of the bill, or work with the Democrats at all. Every Republican but one voted no in the House.
(BTW the one Republican that voted yes was Joseph Cao
http://josephcao.house.gov/) Every Republican voted no in the Senate.
They wanted to stop Obama, not help the American people.