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May 31, 2011 10:48 PM UTC

Forget What I Said Yesterday--Mandates Are Bad Today!

  • 15 Comments
  • by: Colorado Pols

As the Los Angeles Times reports:

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney has renounced it. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich says he doesn’t believe in it anymore. Former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman has brushed off suggestions he even considered it.

As the three have discovered, there is hardly a bigger black mark against a Republican presidential candidate today than the hint of past support for requiring Americans to get health insurance – as President Obama’s new healthcare law mandates.

But Republicans were not always so hostile. Until the healthcare law passed last year, requiring medical insurance had a long history as a mainstream GOP idea…

[T]he Heritage Foundation’s Stuart Butler…in 1989 wrote a health plan that also included an insurance requirement. “If a young man wrecks his Porsche and has not had the foresight to obtain insurance, we may commiserate, but society feels no obligation to repair his car,” Butler told a Tennessee health conference that year.

“But healthcare is different. If a man is struck down by a heart attack in the street, Americans will care for him whether or not he has insurance…. A mandate on individuals recognizes this implicit contract,” said Butler, who was the foundation’s director of domestic policy studies.

As reported very well in this story, an “individual mandate” to carry health insurance, which was the ogre of last year’s failed Amendment 63 in Colorado as well as this year’s unsuccessful legislative attempt to pull Colorado out of federally-administered health care programs, was the central component of the 1993 GOP alternative measure to Bill Clinton’s health reform legislation. The fact that Republicans now declare something they once backed to be a grave threat to liberty isn’t just confusing to you–former GOP Sen. Alan Simpson:

Simpson, a conservative Republican who backed the Chafee bill in 2003, said many in his party seem to have adopted an approach that he described as, “Let’s forget what we need to do and see if we can stick it to the Democrats … or stick it to the president.” [Pols emphasis]

“Nothing makes sense to me anymore,” Simpson said.

And you know what? If any of these former mandate proponents wins the GOP presidential nomination, their health care flip-flops won’t make sense to the American people, either. We’ve already heard about a strategic shift by Republicans away from health care as an issue, a flight to safety gaining momentum as Republicans come under withering fire for their Medicare-privatizing 2012 budget proposal. But after the extreme rhetoric against “Obamacare” and the type of electorate roused in 2010 by it, we just don’t see how the GOP can divorce itself from its hopelessly conflicted history on the matter–in particular these candidates, like “front-runner” Mitt Romney, whose attempts to back away from Massachusetts’ mandated health insurance fall somewhere between “typical politician” and “totally ridiculous.”

A real danger exists that in trying to rewrite his own history, somebody like Romney could convince American voters, once and for all, that Republicans really don’t stand for anything.

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15 thoughts on “Forget What I Said Yesterday–Mandates Are Bad Today!”

  1. I’m surprised to see you pushing the Heritage Foundation canard. They debunked this well before the Democrats shellacking in November. That’s why the Dems couldn’t use it while they were losing last year.

    For the record, we think that the law’s federal mandate is unconstitutional. Our legal center, led by former attorney general Edwin Meese III, notes that Congress has no authority to force an American to buy any good or service merely as a requirement of being alive.

    Yes, in the early 1990s, we, along with other prominent conservative economists, supported the idea of such a mandate. It seemed the only way to solve the “free-rider” problem, in which individuals can, under federal law, walk into any hospital emergency room nationwide and rack up big bills at taxpayer expense.

    Our research in the ensuing two decades has led us to realize our initial idea was operationally ineffective and legally defective. Well before Obama was elected, we dropped it. In the spring 2008 edition of the Harvard Health Policy Review, I advanced far better alternatives to the individual mandate to expand coverage, relying on positive tax incentives and other mechanisms to facilitate enrollment in private health insurance. This is what researchers and fact-based policymakers do when they discover new facts or conduct deeper analysis.

    As for individual Republicans, that’s up to them. I know what I support, and what I will support in a president. And this infringement of liberty is not the way.

    Today, there is no daylight between Republicans on mandates to force the purchase of health insurance. Obama clarified it for us.

    1. The point of the diary is specifically to point out that Republicans have backed the mandate in droves in the recent past.  Yes, that includes the Heritage Foundation, into 2000’s.

      Romney was supporting it during the health care reform debate.  Gingrich supported it at least as recently as 2008.  Huntsman wanted it at least in 2005 when he first began discussing his state’s health care reform efforts.  Pawlenty thought it was part of an overall solution in 2006.  And Alan Simpson is still apparently supporting it and chastising his fellow Republicans for being hyper-political about it.

      1. But it hasn’t worked, because Heritage and these Republicans abandoned the idea before Obama even became President. It is deceitful to suggest that the opposition is simple partisan politics, or they would not have “flip-flopped” at a time when it had no political value.

        It looks more like they simply came to a better conclusion, and that politics had nothing to do with it. I don’t know what Alan Simpson is talking about, but isn’t that true for almost everything he says anymore?

        1. Perhaps they GOP writ large changed their mind on private delivery of health care through individual mandates over the last 5 year, that might have happened we all change our minds.

          However, to go from supporting individual mandates to equating it with socialism in 5 short years is beyond the giggle threshold.

          People can change their minds over time, political positions evolve.  After all, I used to believe that republicans were reasonable people who wanted what was best for the US even though they tended to be a little lacking in empathy and a little afraid of foreigners, women, gays and minorities.  It took me 15 years, but now I think Republicans are mendacious nihilistic douchebags–see I accept that political views can change

        2. I mean, we have a number of GOP politicians running for President whose last pre-Obama statements on reform were in favor of individual mandates.  I’ll give the Heritage Foundation the credit is apparently craves for backing off of the mandate at least by 2008, but these other candidates were still on record as being in support.

          Gingrich was still pushing it in 2008.  Did he recant somehow between the beginning of 2008 and the beginning of 2009, or are you trying to blow smoke up my ass?

          Romney, in a discussion with a conservative blogger in 2010, had this discussion:

          You have stated your intention to spearhead the effort to repeal the ‘worst aspects’ of Obamacare, does this include the repeal of the individual mandate and pre-existing exclusion?”

          The Governor’s answer:

          “No.”

          Gov. Romney went on to explain that he does not wish to repeal these aspects because of the deleterious effect it would have on those with pre-existing conditions in obtaining health insurance.

          Exactly when did these people change their minds, since you seem to be so adamant in telling me that they did so?

    2. ArapaGOP is clear about his opposition to universal healthcare. This is consistent with the general Republican Party opposition to Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, Unemployment Insurance.

      Democrats have the opposite set of values.

      The US government is basically a very large insurance program with a defense department. You can provide tax breaks to the wealthy ONLY by borrowin from the Japanese and cutting government insurance programs.

      Universal healthcare REQUIRES three legs:

      (1) Guaranteed issue to eliminate adverse selection

      (2) Mandates to eliminate healthy people sidestepping

      (3) Subsidies so poor can afford it

    3. You and Heritage imply that Heritage turned against a mandate before a Dem president took office and the Dems started pushing a big health bill. False. Heritage’s big “study” (which reached a preordained conclusion, of course) finding the health mandate unconst dates only to 12/09:

      http://www.heritage.org/Resear…

    1. We must control the exploding cost of our entitlements in order to save the next generation’s entitlements.

      That’s what you’re trying to say, just not as absurdly mischaracterized. And perfectly reasonable too.

      1. when you “control the exploding cost of our entitlements”, but not the cost of health care?

        To me it looks like a recipe for bankruptcy followed by death. And all so rich folks can keep their Bush tax cut.  

      2. The Ryan plan proposes to stop supporting Medicare for all people 55 and under, and instead it proposes to send vouchers to these people so that they can buy health insurance (or health care).  Do I get this part right?

        And the Ryan plan fixes that voucher amount in a way that it pays seniors less than what Medicare would require to cover the cost of premiums.  That’s how it saves money, yes?

        And Republicans have told us that Medicare does not pay doctors enough.  And the private insurance industry and conservative-leaning studies have shown that Medicare overheads for administration are (conservatively) less than 1/3 that of the private insurance industry (discussed the other day).  Are you still with me?

        If Medicare has lower administrative costs than private insurance, and doesn’t pay doctors enough to start with, then how the Hell do you expect private insurers to cover the elderly while receiving less money than the Medicare premiums?

        1. Privatization of medicare means you add private insurance inefficiency: 15% administrative costs and 20% profits. Mediare has less than 5% adminstration and no profits.

          Curious that Republicans support private, mandated, & subsidized insurance for older people, but oppose it for non-elderly.

          1. I want to be clear on this: I was using only data and talking points favored by Republicans in my response.

            The 1/3 cost of administration was from the CAHI (insurance industry) report that puts Medicare administration at 5.2% and private insurance administration (and profits) at 16.7%.

            1. Just like…

              Entitlements means the government social insurance programs for all of us, i.e. Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, Unemployment Insurance. These are insruance programs. You pay in; you get benefits.

              Entitlement Reform means eliminating or slashing Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid.

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