So it is never a huge surprise when Republican are lying hypocrites. It's in their DNA. And I'm sure people here already know that. Just wanted to add some more facts.
So while President Clinton was pushing for employers to cover their workers in his 1993 bill, John Chafee of Rhode Island, along with 20 other GOP senators and Rep. Bill Thomas of California, introduced legislation that instead featured an individual mandate. Four of those Republican co-sponsors — Hatch, Charles Grassley of Iowa, Robert Bennett of Utah and Christopher Bond of Missouri — remain in the Senate today.
Mr Death Panel changed his mind, but he had a really good reason:
If it was unconstitutional today, it was unconstitutional in 1993, but I don’t think anybody gave it much thought until three or four months ago when you start looking at what constitutional lawyers say about it because constitutional lawyers wouldn’t have been looking at the mandate
And what about theMaverick?
"The truth is this is a Republican idea," said Linda Quick, president of the South Florida Hospital and Healthcare Association. She said she first heard the concept of the "individual mandate" in a Miami speech in the early 1990s by Sen. John McCain, a conservative Republican from Arizona, to counter the "Hillarycare" the Clintons were proposing.
As late as 2003, this was such a conservative issue that John Breaux of Louisiana, who was probably one of the most conservative Democrats of the past 10 years and one of the 2 Democratic co-sponsors of that bill, was still defending the concept:
I’d like to see a nationwide federal mandate that every U.S. citizen purchase a private health insurance policy. There would be a basic plan, that the government would help fund for low-income people who can’t afford it. The government’s subsidy would be graduated according to income, to the point where you would ultimately be responsible for paying for it all yourself when you can afford to. People could buy more than the basic plan if they wanted to, but it would be at their expense. We are working with insurance companies, employers, think tanks, and others about how this would be structured. It would have to involve some type of risk pooling.
.....
The debate ten years ago was about an employer mandate ("play or pay"), but the employers resisted, so we didn’t do it. But this is not the same thing. And it’s not a "government-run" program in the sense of being a "single-payer" system. I don’t want a government-run program. I support an individual mandate to buy private health insurance. We have to travel a lot of road in order to get there, from where we are now, with the current mix of group and individual, public and private coverage. But I think that it’s the right way to go.
Some liberals disagreed with mandates back then as well, just like today. But in 2007,
Even so, in polling by the Harvard School of Public Health, nearly 80 percent of Democrats said they favored an individual mandate (while most Republicans opposed it)
It's hard to argue that this is inconsistent with recent history for liberals. And that is exactly what the Heritage Foundation thought, right? A bunch of flaming commie stuff.Well,as Lee Fang has demonstrated:
Not an unreasonable position, and one that is clearly consistent with conservative values.
We need to trot out moderate Democrats like Breaux and Bob Kerrey along with moderate Republicans to defend, what in a sane world, would be called a moderate health insurance reform law.
At the very least, Breaux's support should counteract the fact that the only Democratic Attorney General to support the constitutionality lawsuit is from Louisiana, giving it a shine of bipartisanship.
We won't even discuss the fact that people who hate "legislating from unelected judicial activists" wanting judicial activism.