I didn't see the McLatchy article below here at KOS. As we watch the GOP work themselves into a lather about health insurance reform, in particular about the individual mandate requirement, it is useful to keep in mind that it was their idea! The McClatchy article provides some nice quotes.
More after the fold...
13 GOP state's attorney generals are preparing to challenge the constitutionality of health care reform because of the individual mandate. McClatchy reports that the individual mandates is a Republican idea.
"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.
and
McCain did not embrace the concept during his 2008 election campaign, but other leading Republicans did, including Tommy Thompson, secretary of Health and Human Services under President George W. Bush.
Seeking to deradicalize the idea during a symposium in Orlando in September 2008, Thompson said, "Just like people are required to have car insurance, they could be required to have health insurance."
Among the other Republicans who had embraced the idea was Mitt Romney, who as governor of Massachusetts crafted a huge reform by requiring almost all citizens to have coverage.
"Some of my libertarian friends balk at what looks like an individual mandate," Romney wrote in The Wall Street Journal in 2006. "But remember, someone has to pay for the health care that must, by law, be provided: Either the individual pays or the taxpayers pay. A free ride on government is not libertarian."
Romney was referring to the federal law that requires everyone to be treated in emergency rooms, regardless of their ability to pay.
It just goes to show that the GOP has, all along, been operating on bad faith. They simply don't care about policy per se except at one basic level: does it endorse and further the idea that those with power and influence enjoy more of it while further disadvantaging those without. "Hillarycare" had to be destroyed and so the right wing think tanks come up with individual mandate idea which GOPers then used as a talking point. The mandate idea becomes "unconstitutional" just at the point it might become policy.