On Friday, Joel Ario, the Director of the Office of Insurance Exchanges at HHS reiterated his claim that regulators on the state level are far more open to implementing the exchanges in the Affordable Care Act than the current political rhetoric suggests. Speaking at a panel for the Alliance on Health Reform, Ario said “that there was a lot of interest on the state level in these exchanges and that it was very focused and very specific to the fact that state markets are broken.” “It’s hard to see who’s from a red state or a blue state, you just see people who are working in their marketplaces trying to put things together.” Watch it:

Washington and Lee University law professor Tim Jost, also a member of the panel, reiterated that the idea behind an exchange “comes out of free market advocacy groups and has been endorsed by them in the past. The particular way it is shaped, we’ll see blue states taking one approach and red states taking one approach, maybe,” he stressed, referring to the two existing exchange models in Massachusetts and Utah. Blue states may follow California’s lead and adopt the Massachusetts model, which allows the authority that governs the Exchange to bargain with insurance companies on behalf of consumers and requires issuers to meet certain minimum standards. Red states, conversely, may consider the Utah model where consumers can “compare a wide variety of health plans sold by any insurers that want to participate.”

Ario also added that he first heard of exchanges from a Republican legislator in Oregon, “who had a concept paper from Ed Haislmaie at the Heritage Foundation. I followed the idea for several years there, as it made its way through the Heritage foundation. They took credit for getting Governor Romney to support the idea in Massachusetts and to date, the three states that have exchanges have all been led by Republican governors.” (Click here to read Haislmaie’s article praising the exchanges and the individual mandate.)

Heritage may now be downplaying its support for the concept, but the exchanges are still fairly popular in conservative states. Last month, for instance, 48 states — 21 of which are suing the federal government over the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act — accepted federal grants “to invest in research and planning to get the Exchanges up and running” by 2014.

The LA Times’ Noam Levey reminds us that the policies Republicans would replace the Affordable Care Act with are the same old tired proposals that have been offered (and rejected) in the past:

But some conservatives acknowledge that the healthcare program offered by party leaders is largely unchanged from the proposals the GOP pushed when it held majorities from 2000 to 2006. During that period, insurance premiums skyrocketed, businesses reduced benefits and the number of Americans without health insurance rose. [...]

While there is some disagreement, Republicans have largely coalesced around an approach that builds on basic pillars of GOP healthcare policy: loosen state regulation of insurance markets to allow insurers to sell policies across state lines; put new limits on medical malpractice lawsuits; and expand so-called high-risk pools to provide insurance to sick Americans who are denied coverage.

“We will approach it in smaller bites. That is the wiser course,” said Minnesota Rep. John Kline, who is in line to chair the Education and Labor Committee in a Republican-controlled House.

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) — who has offered several proposals to repeal parts of the Affordable Care Act — predicts some kind of conservative health renaissance, telling Levey, “We could come up with a healthcare system that the American people would not only be proud of, but would actually love,” he said. “We’ve never had a real conservative majority.” But this seems unlikely, particularly if Republicans continue to recycle the health care policies of President Bush and Sen. John McCain (R-AZ). In fact, most existing GOP proposals are almost identical to what McCain offered during the 2008 campaign and are filled with the same kinds of consequences that arise from deregulating the insurance industry and unraveling the employer-based system without simultaneously adding consumer protections to the individual market.

Interestingly, if Republicans were really looking for the kind of reforms that the “American people would not only be proud of, but would actually love,” they would have to reclaim their old support for the exchanges, consumer reforms in the individual health market and subsidies to help lower income Americans afford coverage. But that would require preserving the existing health law.

Yesterday, FOX CT, a local Fox affiliate in Connecticut, pulled an ad bankrolled by undisclosed donors to the American Action Network because “the commercial’s claims are unsubstantiated” and made “false or misleading statements” about the Affordable Care Act. Now, Politico’s Pulse is reporting that in Colorado, “AAN voluntarily took down an ad on the local NBC affiliate, 9News, that claims Rep. Ed Perlmutter (D-CO) supported a health reform bill that would pay for Viagra for rapists” after “a 9News reporter had posted a fact check challenging the ad’s claims late Monday.”

WOMAN 1: You have to check the article I sent you. Apparently convicted rapists can get Viagra paid for by the new health care bill.

WOMAN 2: Are you serious?

WOMAN 1: Yep! I mean Viagra for rapists? With my tax dollars? And Congressman Perlmutter voted for it.

Watch it:

But as the K9News fact check notes, “this is false. Perlmutter never voted for it.” “The new health law treats sex offenders who are not incarcerated the same way the old law did. They can buy any health plan they choose. Some might cover drugs like Viagra, some might not. The new law doesn’t say anything about these types of drugs.”

Meanwhile, an AAN spokesperson tells Politico that “This is all Democrat hyperventilation” and claims that they were planning on taking down the Colorado ad anyway.