MEGAN MCARDLE: Walker and Rubio Health Reform Plans Hint At GOP Direction.

The Republican plan is, in fact, a program for the middle class. As such, it will be much less generous toward the poor. It will redistribute money upward, from those struggling very hard to ordinary Joes who are not rich, but not quite so desperate either. Don’t get me wrong: It will also do other things, and there’s a lot to like about regulating more lightly and putting more power into consumers’ hands. But this redistribution is one of the obvious effects, and it is the ideological divide over which the battle will be fought.

In this debate, you can see the shape of where our politics may go over the next 20 years. Many Republicans would like a much smaller entitlement state; some Democrats would like a much bigger one, with Sweden-style universal coverage of virtually everything, crib to grave. Neither one is going to get what they want, because Americans are not prepared to give up their Social Security checks, or 60 percent of their paychecks either — and no, there is not enough money to fund these ambitions, or even our existing entitlements, by simply taxing “the rich.”

There are a lot of ways this could play out, but the Republican proposals for a post-Obamacare world sketch a very plausible one: Republicans become the party of universal, but lean, benefits that won’t be enough to lift people out of poverty, while Democrats become the party of generous benefits for the poor, redistributing money and benefits downwards from the middle class while paying lip service to middle-class problems. Who wins that debate will tell us a lot about what kind of government we’ll have in 50 years.

Democrats can’t run a Swedish-style redistributive state because they’re not nearly as honest as the Swedes.