Too bad high-risk pools don’t count as a conservative health-care-reform plan because actual conservative elected officials aren’t willing to fund them.

This week, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor tried to bring up a much-reduced version of high-risk-pool support for a vote: the Helping Sick Americans Now Act. The objective was to show that Republicans aren’t nihilists and really do care about the uninsured. It was an empty gesture: Cantor’s bill would have diverted $3.7 billion over four years from Obamacare into a high-risk-pool program. That’s less than 5 percent of the amount that conservative health policy experts Jim Capretta and Tom Miller think would be necessary for a robust program, so almost all sick people who don’t have insurance now would still have gone without under Cantor’s bill.

But it was still more money for the sick and uninsured than Republicans are willing to spend. …

As long as conservative writers on health care are producing talking points against Obamacare, they are a valued part of the conservative policy machine. But when they propose alternative methods to expand health-care access, Republicans ignore them.