No, I'm not a PUMA. I was an Obama supporter from start to finish, but at yesterday's Health Care Summitt he said something that, if true, IMHO, warrants an apology to Hillary Clinton.
During the Summit, Obama took a moment to respond to concerns about the individual mandate, i.e. the provision in the House and Senate bills requiring that all Americans purchase health insurance or pay a fine:
THE PRESIDENT: When I ran in the Democratic primary I was opposed to the mandate.
A PARTICIPANT: Bless you.
THE PRESIDENT: Well -- and I'll -- because my theory was, you know what, the reason they don't have health insurance isn't because somebody is not telling them to get it, but because they just can't afford it, and that if we lowered costs enough then everybody would be able to get it. So I was dragged, kicking and screaming to the conclusion that I arrived at, which is, is that it makes sense for us to have everybody purchase insurance.
. . .
The reason I came to this conclusion is twofold. One is cost-shifting, which is a fancy term for saying everybody here who has health insurance is one way or another paying for those who don't.
. . .
The second reason has to do with the issue of preexisting conditions and the pool that we've already discussed, but I just wanted to address those two issues.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
Now, we know that this statement, if true, was as true in 2007 and 2008 as it is now. The concerns that motivate the individual mandate are the same today as they were then.
Obama appears to be making the claim that he was unaware of these concerns back then. I don't think that's credible. A quick contemporaneous perusal of the opinion page of the New York Times would have found Paul Krugman saying things like this:
As a practical matter, letting people opt out if they don’t feel like buying insurance would make insurance substantially more expensive for everyone else.
Here’s why: under the Obama plan, as it now stands, healthy people could choose not to buy insurance — then sign up for it if they developed health problems later. Insurance companies couldn’t turn them away, because Mr. Obama’s plan, like those of his rivals, requires that insurers offer the same policy to everyone.
As a result, people who did the right thing and bought insurance when they were healthy would end up subsidizing those who didn’t sign up for insurance until or unless they needed medical care.
http://www.nytimes.com/...
And Obama was not passively holding this position. Two months after Krugman wrote those words, in the very heat of the primary campaign, Obama sent out thousands of mailers that boldly proclaimed:
Hillary's health care plan forces everyone to buy insurance, even if you can't afford it.
Krugman almost prophetically anticipated the long-term costs of such a strategy:
The Obama campaign sends out an ugly mailer. Sorry, but this is just destructive — like the Obama plan, the Clinton plan offers subsidies to lower-income families. And BO himself has conceded that he might have to penalize people who don’t buy insurance until they need care. So this is just poisoning the well for health care reform. The politics of hope, indeed.
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/...
The only logical conclusion is that Obama opposed the unpopular individual mandate for short-term political advantage, at the cost of the long-term prospects for winning health care reform. Hillary, on the other hand, took the hits in standing for a politically unpopular, but ultimately necessary, essential element of a comprehensive health care bill.
Again, I'm not a PUMA. I have no particular love for Hillary. And for the record, I still oppose the individual mandate. I know it makes the policy questions more difficult, but so does the fact that a lot of people don't eat their vegetables or exercise -- are you going to pass laws requiring them to do that as well?
After yesterday, however, we can conclude in retrospect that Obama cynically targeted Hillary's support for the mandate, even though he had to have known that he would ultimately end up supporting it.
That was fundamentally unfair to her personally and detrimental to the general Democratic and progressive cause, and thus worthy of an apology.
Maybe he did so privately when he met with her about appointing her to Secretary of State.
I hope so.