It turns out that the GOP alternative health care proposal has been in development longer than anyone knew. Our intrepid researchers have unearthed an excerpt from the original draft, dating to 360 B.C.E.
"When a carpenter is ill he asks the physician for a rough and ready cure; an emetic or a purge or a cautery or the knife, --these are his remedies.
And if some one prescribes for him a course of dietetics, and tells him that he must swathe and swaddle his head, and all that sort of thing, he replies at once that he has no time to be ill, and that he sees no good in a life which is spent in nursing his disease to the neglect of his customary employment; and therefore bidding good-bye to this sort of physician, he resumes his ordinary habits, and either gets well and lives and does his business, or, if his constitution falls, he dies and has no more trouble. "
(Plato, The Republic, Book III)