President Obama's health care bill requires all Americans have health insurance or else face a tax penalty; Conservative Republicans say that infringes on individual liberty.
Who first proposed making health insurance compulsory?
The Heritage Foundation, a very conservative think tank.
In the late 1980s, when Democrats were pushing to require employers to provide health insurance, the foundation started thinking about ways to achieve universal coverage without placing a heavy burden on business. Its experts soon encountered the "free rider" problem: In a system where insurers are barred from refusing applicants with pre-existing conditions, many people — especially the young and healthy — would only buy a policy when illness struck. But if only sick people bought coverage, insurers would pay out more in doctors' bills than they received in premiums, and quickly go bust. To overcome this death spiral, the Heritage Foundation suggested that every American be required to buy health insurance, a requirement known as the individual mandate.
Which politicians took up that idea?
Many Republicans did in the early 1990s, after President Clinton introduced a plan that would have forced companies to cover employees.
"I am for people, individuals — exactly like automobile insurance — having health insurance and being required to have health insurance," said Newt Gingrich, then House minority whip, in 1993.
When the Clinton plan collapsed in 1994, talk of the individual mandate died with it. But a decade later, Mitt Romney, then the governor of Massachusetts, resurrected the concept for his state health-care plan, which requires residents to buy health insurance or pay up to $1,212 in annual penalties.
"It's a Republican way of reforming the market," Mitt Romney said when the law debuted, in 2006. "[To have] people show up [at a hospital] when they get sick, and expect someone else to pay, that's a Democratic approach."
And now with Obama as president, the Republicans and the Tea Party do a complete 180 degree turnabout for political convenience as the right-wing feign abomination over an individual mandate.
Nuff said.
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