You know, I find it kind of ironic that the Republicans are willing to strike down a law that would help millions of Americans with healthcare costs based almost solely on a provision that THEY wanted in the first place (The individual mandate, that is). Individual mandates themselves are nothing new, and the idea goes back even further than RomneyCare. This mandate can be traced back at least as far as 1989, when conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation's lectures on providing affordable healthcare for all Americans (link here).
As the link above points out, several Republicans in congress were for this mandate, even writing bills to bring it about:
In 1993, Republicans twice introduced health care bills that contained an individual health insurance mandate. Advocates for those bills included prominent Republicans who today oppose the mandate including Orrin Hatch (R-UT), Charles Grassley (R-IA), Robert Bennett (R-UT), and Christopher Bond (R-MO). In 2007, Democrats and Republicans introduced a bi-partisan bill containing the mandate.
By the time Obama was in office, however, these same politicians had done a complete 180:
By 2010, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), sometimes referred to as "Obamacare,” had passed in both the House and the Senate with no Republican votes. On Mar. 23, 2010 President Obama signed the act containing an individual mandate into law. On Jan. 5, 2011, Republicans in the US House of Representatives introduced The Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act (HR 2) to repeal the PPACA. One of their main arguments for repeal was that the health insurance mandate was unconstitutional.
You can take a look at the link above for more. Now that the history lesson is over, it's rant time. If you are squeamish, don't like name calling or curse words, I suggest you not follow below the fold.
Let me start this rant off by saying that the current congress has got to be one of THE most obstructionist, petty and spiteful groups of people I have ever seen (And by those words, I'm talking about the Tea Party/'Libertarian' lunatic fringe of the Republican Party). Despite the fact that most of the ideas they presented were contained in the ACA, they're doing an awful lot to strike down the bill, and the reason why is simple: Because in their eyes, Obama is a Kenyan Muslim Marxist Communist Fascist Socialist Radical Leftist Nazi who wants to take away their guns and put them in FEMA Camps.
That mindset has 'trickled down' to their faithful constituents who will vote for them no matter how much they're economically raped by they policies they write into law, and for this reason, I have come to the conclusion that there is almost no difference between the average Republican and the average worshiper of the Libertarian Pantheon who believes that congressman Ron Paul (Saint Ron) can do or say no wrong.
To them, it does not matter how much suffering the average person endures just to make ends meet, they will always be the ones to blame in their eyes, because they're 'cheating the system'. Meanwhile, folks like Ayn Rand, Paul Ryan and Rick Scott will gladly take advantage of the very social services they wish to see destroyed outright.
Their party politics have done a lot of damage to this country and I have had enough, so I present a challenge to both moderate liberals and progressives alike: It's time to take out the trash, much like FDR and Harry Truman did because both realized that there was no reasoning with the unreasonable FYIGM economic royalists who call themselves Republicans or Libertarians. Hell, they even tried to have FDR killed and they were outed by the leader of the group they were backing (Smedley Butler, The American Liberty League).
We need to rally together, whether it's here online, on the streets or wherever, because as the 2012 Republican circus is showing us, we can't afford to back down.
In solidarity,
Homer