As Barb noted yesterday, Marco Rubio, the GOP nominee for U.S. Senate in Florida, told a group of conservative bloggers that he actually supports key provisions in the health care reform bill passed earlier this year with unanimous Republican opposition.
Fearful of teabagger backlash, Rubio-land rushed to "clarify" that Rubio wasn't reversing his long-stated pledge to repeal the entire bill, saying: "Marco believes the health care law should be repealed – all of it."
But now it turns out there's video of Rubio's comments, and it's clear as day that he supports at least two key provisions of the health care reform bill, both of which he says have "widespread support." Rubio made it very clear he does not want to repeal them. Watch:
There's really no ambiguity here. For example, on the question of whether he supports the provision banning the insurance company practice of denying coverage due to pre-existing conditions:
REPORTER: So you wouldn't scrap pre-existing conditions?
RUBIO: No.
REPORTER: You would keep that in?
RUBIO: Yeah. And I think there's broad support for that.
Obviously Marco Rubio can read the polls -- he knows it would be a political death sentence to fully repeal health care reform. The problem he has is that his teabagging base isn't willing to compromise: they want full repeal, nothing more, nothing less.
Moreover, by supporting the ban on pre-existing conditions, Rubio is implicitly supporting the individual mandate, because you really can't have one without the other without creating an enormous moral hazard. (If there weren't a mandate, it wouldn't make sense to get coverage until you needed it, but if everybody followed that practice, the entire system would break down.)
Obviously, Rubio would never admit he supports the individual mandate, but if he doesn't repeal the ban on pre-existing conditions, he's not going to repeal the mandate either. In addition, he clearly stated he would not support repeal of the provision allowing children to remain on their parents' insurance policies until they turn 27.
It'll be fun to see how this plays out. If Rubio hopes to win the general election, he's going to have to move to the middle, but if he moves to the middle, he's going to risk losing the teabaggers. Whatever he does, it might be too late: though Democratic candidate Kendrick Meek trails Rubio, most polls show Charlie Crist holding a sizable and growing lead over Rubio. If Rubio can't get his story straight, he might blow the election before even officially getting his party's nomination.