The Irony of Obamacare: Republicans Thought of It First by Meghan Foley.
From the post:
“An irony of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) is that one of its key provisions, the individual insurance mandate, has conservative origins. In Congress, the requirement that individuals to purchase health insurance first emerged in Republican health care reform bills introduced in 1993 as alternatives to the Clinton plan. The mandate was also a prominent feature of the Massachusetts plan passed under Governor Mitt Romney in 2006. According to Romney, ‘we got the idea of an individual mandate from [Newt Gingrich], and [Newt] got it from the Heritage Foundation.’” – Tracing the Flow of Policy Ideas in Legislatures: A Text Reuse Approach
That irony led John Wilkerson of the University of Washington and his colleagues David Smith and Nick Stramp to study the legislative history of the health care reform law using a text-analysis system to understand its origins.
Scholars rely almost exclusively on floor roll call voting patterns to assess partisan cooperation in Congress, according to findings in the paper, Tracing the Flow of Policy Ideas in Legislatures: A Text Reuse Approach. By that standard, the Affordable Care was a highly partisan bill. Yet a different story emerges when the source of the reform’s policy is analyzed. The authors’ findings showed that a number of GOP policy ideas overlap with provisions in the Affordable Care Act: Of the 906-page law, 3 percent of the “policy ideas” used wording similar to bills sponsored by House Republicans and 8 percent used wording similar to bills sponsored by Senate Republicans.
In the paper, the authors say:
Our approach is to focus on legislative text. We assume that two bills share a policy idea when they share similar text. Of course, this raises many questions about whether similar text does actually capture shared policy ideas. This paper constitutes an early cut at the question.
The same thinking, similar text = similar ideas, permeates prior art searches on patents as well.
A more fruitful search would be of donor statements, proposals, literature for similar language/ideas.
In that regard, members of the United States Congress are just messengers.
PS: Thanks to Sam Hunting for the pointer to this article!