A few other bloggers have pointed out that the "Act for the Relief of Sick and Disabled Seamen" championed by John Adams is less an example of mandated healthcare (though sailors were required to pay a tax to support it) than it is socialized medicine, or "Medicare for Sailors," as BTD would have it.
That aside, Greg Sargent points out that freedom-loving, small government proponent (and Tea Party hero) Thomas Jefferson was a big supporter of the Act.
Well, Jefferson did support this plan, the historian, Adam Rothman, a Georgetown University history professor who specializes in the early republic, tells me. Rothman emails:
Alexander Hamilton supported the establishment of Marine Hospitals in a 1792 Report, and it was a Federalist congress that passed the law in 1798. But Jefferson (Hamilton's strict constructionist nemesis) also supported federal marine hospitals, and along with his own Treasury Secretary, Albert Gallatin, took steps to improve them during his presidency. So I guess you could say it had bipartisan support.
As I noted here yesterday, the comparison between this 1798 measure and the individual mandate is imperfect. The 1798 act was a tax -- mandatory for all merchant marine sailors to pay if they wanted to work -- that was used to support the marine hospital system they used if they got sick or injured. But as Ezra Klein notes, this was in many ways similar to the system underlying the idea of Medicare-for-all -- they paid taxes in exchange for government run insurance.
And it had the support of the Tea Party demi-God himself, Thomas Jefferson.
Very forward thinking of our founders, you could say progressive, even. It made sense at the turn of the 19th century, it makes sense in the 21st.