Perhaps someone can assist me with the proper spelling of “hypocrisy.”
Conservatives Sowed Idea of Health Care Mandate, Only to Spurn It Later
By MICHAEL COOPER
Published: February 14, 2012
It can be difficult to remember now, given the ferocity with which many Republicans assail it as an attack on freedom, but the provision in President Obama’s health care law requiring all Americans to buy health insurance has its roots in conservative thinking.
Gary Stewart/Associated Press
Waiting for Hillary Rodham Clinton in 1994, a crowd in Seattle gathered to protest a Clinton administration health care plan.
The concept that people should be required to buy health coverage was fleshed out more than two decades ago by a number of conservative economists, embraced by scholars at conservative research groups, including the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute, and championed, for a time, by Republicans in the Senate.
The individual mandate, as it is known, was seen then as a conservative alternative to some of the health care approaches favored by liberals — like creating a national health service or requiring employers to provide health coverage.
“In 1993, in fighting ‘Hillarycare,’ virtually every conservative saw the mandate as a less dangerous future than what Hillary was trying to do,” Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House, said at a debate in December, casting his past support of a mandate as an antidote to the health care overhaul proposed by Hillary Rodham Clinton during her husband’s administration.
Since then the politics of health care have grown more twisted and tangled Read the rest of this entry »
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