Obamacare's hidden parentage

By K.N.C., R.L.W. and G.D.

Big data reveals Republican policies in America's healthcare law

ON THE surface, it looks totally partisan. Not a single Republican voted for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, aka "Obamacare". But the law is filled with concessions to them. A new computer analysis counts the GOP policy ideas that overlap with other bills that made it into the law: 3% from the House and 8% from the Senate. In fact, when "mark-up" bills are excluded—basically, amendments and legislative re-writes—11% and 28% of policy ideas from Congressional and Senate Republicans, respectively, align. John Wilkerson of the University of Washington and his colleagues studied the legislative history using big data. They ran the PPACA through a text-analysis system that could spot similar wording in previous legislation with a better than 90% accuracy. That let them identify the date and sponsor of earlier bills that ended up in the law, indicated as circles in the chart. Hence, proposals by Republican Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa on nursing home transparency in March 2009 were incorporated by Democratic lawmakers in later bills, before appearing in the law. So was it really necessary to shut down the government?