The Republicans like to wear the Stars and Stripes as outerwear (maybe underwear too but mercifully we're spared from knowing), chant "USA, USA" at the least provocation, and routinely call into question the patriotism of anyone who disagrees with them. But just how patriotic is the GOP? Examining the party's health care reform argument, to the extent that it is an argument, we can only conclude that the Republicans are not patriotic at all.
Central to anti-reform logic is the premise that anything run by the federal government is bad, so a federal health insurance program is automatically a terrible idea. It must inevitably be corrupt, wasteful, incompetent and, at least according to GOP sages like Sarah Palin, lethal to old people and the differently abled. Furthermore a government health insurance program would put the good guy private health insurance industry out of business. Never mind that her so-called "death panels" are figments of Palin's fevered imagination. And that private insurers are not good guys at all. Also, as Obama pointed out the other day, the US Postal Service isn't exactly bankrupting Fedex and UPS – if anything, the reverse is true.
But these actual facts are peripheral to the central GOP contention about the evil of anything the federal government touches. Social Security and Medicare, although highly popular and successful programs, are evil according to Republicans. Their efforts to "reform" them are always half or even quarter-hearted however, because for the GOP reform really means eradication. Which, if successful, would lose them one of their few remaining constituencies, aging white people, who to a person approve of Social Security and Medicare. To date GOP efforts to convince these constituents that Medicare and Social Security are not in fact government programs at all have been only partly successful.
The point is that if it's a federal government program, the Republicans just hate it. The United States Army, Navy, Marines, and Air Force are all government programs. According to their own logic, such as it is, the GOP therefore hates our troops. If that's patriotism, then the Earth was created in six days and is five thousand or so years old. Which, oddly enough, is something many Republicans apparently believe.