You kind of answered your own question. No Republican was or is going to address the drivers of those costs.
It's hardly limited to the Rs; as you yourself pointed out the ACA drove costs higher when it passed largely on the idea of lowering them.
It also had the effect of ruining healthcare plans for a lot of people who already had them, but never-mind that now.
Examples of those drivers abound, of course, and I don't want to derail this thread by getting into the weeds there.
Understood.
However, it suffices to say that each of those drivers is something of a political hot potato, no way to address it without somebody on NBC accusing you of being a meanie doo-doo head who hates the poor/old people/blacks/immigrants/etc.
That's impossible to address without getting into those weeds, as you say. You and I may have different ideas about what constitutes a cost driver, however.
My point here is unlike the Democrats, who are willing to piss people off to accomplish something they consider important (recall that they sacrificed their congressional majority to get the Affordable Care Act passed), Republicans flee the room and retreat to the safety of bromides about tax cuts and national defense.
The ACA was a scam that rewarded insurers, crushed Medicare/Medicaid patients and destroyed health insurance for a lot of people as they had it and as they enjoyed it. In return, it gave away really lousy health insurance to a handful of the lesser classes so as to be able to say, "we got more people covered".
While I'll never agree that the Rs are good stewards of taxpayer money as they currently exist, nor will I argue about the waste inherent in funding the military-industrial complex, National Defense is actually something the Constitution mandates the Congress provide - unlike health insurance.
To bring it back to something more on-topic, rolling up antifa should be an absolute no-fucking-brainer for the Republicans. This is an international network of loosely-organized terror cells that has been enlisted by our own Democrats to use street violence as a tool in American politics. The people who organize and fund these things are flesh-and-blood persons that can be arrested, tried, and prosecuted. The increasing willingness of the Democrats to use low-level terrorism in electoral politics is about as close to an existential threat to our political order as we've seen since the 1860s. And what's the Republican response? It's to wring their hands and worry, "But gee, if I come out and talk about how the Democrats work hand-in-hand with masked street goons to terrorize American communities...won't the media accuse me of being a fascist sympathizer who doesn't care about systemic racism? Best to sit this one out!" In fact, it's worse than that. A lot of senior Republicans saw antifa violence during the Summer of Love as a chance to...fuck Donald Trump. They not-so-subtly signaled in a variety of outlets that if Trump used federal power to do anything, they were going to join with the Democrats and oust him.
While I mostly agree with you on this point, the simple fact of the matter is that a violent response to the activities of the degenerate freak left's mob is not only warranted but unavoidable if they continue to escalate their activities. Blood will have to be shed and bullets will have to fly - and the problem, particularly in the current environment, is that when we start shooting, we won't be able to easily stop.
Very few people want to call for actions that will lead to that.
About the only non-violent solution left is for a culling of Soros-backed local DAs who will vigorously prosecute the perpetrators of the violence as well as those that finance it; the window is closing on that possibility.
So whether we're talking about health care or antifa terrorism, the GOP stance is the same. "We're not going to do anything. Hey, don't you feel like your taxes are too high?"
Two solutions: stop voting for the wrong Republicans and become the change you want to see happen. There is a quote attributed to a historical figure [I can't remember which] that says, in effect, if you choose not t be a leader you will be led by inferior people. Americans have abdicated their responsibility to be informed and active in the governing process.
