Individual Mandate is as Republican as God

As the nation's highest court in the land hears arguments for and against the 2009 health care reform package, it's important to remember that the most controversial aspect of that reform, the individual mandate, was invented by the GOP and remained a staple of any Republican reform as recent as 2008.  It was their plan right up until Barack Obama put it in his bill.

The individual insurance mandate, which requires virtually all Americans to obtain health coverage or pay a fine, was the brainchild of conservative economists and embraced by some of the nation’s most prominent Republicans for nearly two decades. Yet today many of those champions — including presidential hopefuls Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich — are among the mandate’s most vocal critics.

Now since it was passed by a Democratic Congress and signed by a Democratic President, Republicans claim the mandate is socialism, tyranny, unconstitutional and will force people to die.

What's also interesting about the mandate is that Republicans used the mandate as the central element in an alternative against Bill Clinton's 1993 health care reform efforts.  Yes, that's right. Republicans submitted an alternative plan against "HillaryCare" as a way to use what they claimed to be market-based approaches to reforming the nation's health care system.

By 1993, when President Bill Clinton was readying his major health-care overhaul bill, the Heritage approach — subsidizing and facilitating the purchase of private health plans, while using the individual mandate to maximize participation — had gelled as the natural Republican alternative.

Quite interesting when you stop and think of all the things Republicans are saying about it now. Hypocrisy really doesn't even begin to describe it:

For a while the mandate also retained the support of many prominent Republicans. But as negotiations with Democrats over the health-care bill fell apart in the spring of 2009 — and Republicans spent their August 2009 recess at town hall meetings where furious tea party activists accused them of fomenting a government takeover of health care — positions on the mandate started to shift.

That September, Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), a co-sponsor of the 1993 Chafee bill containing the mandate and a vocal supporter of the idea just three months earlier, declared that “individuals should maintain the freedom to choose whether to purchase health insurance coverage or not.”

It's delusion, no doubt about it. Delusion the media is happy to promote and more than happy to feed the beast in order to get higher ratings. After all, what fun would watching the news be if you learned that Washington actually got along much better than is portrayed.