The Health-Care Summit: The Unbridgeable Gap

James Surowiecki at the New Yorker provides a pretty good summary of the Republican position based on yesterday's summit:

For Republicans, the current health-insurance system works reasonably well—in their minds, it’s a key part of what they kept referring to as “the best health-care system in the world”—and therefore whatever changes need to be should be small. The Republicans kept using the word “incremental” to describe their proposed changes, but this is really a red herring, in the sense that it implies that their ultimate goal is to dramatically revamp the current health-insurance system, and that they simply want to do so more slowly than Democrats. That’s not accurate: the Republicans are reasonably satisfied with what’s currently in place. The fact that tens of millions of Americans don’t have health insurance is not, in their mind, an issue that government should be trying to solve—at least not if it will cost any real money.

This is one of those essential difference between convervatives and liberals.  Conservatives don't believe the government can or should fix problems, and liberals do.