Republicans Were For the Health Insurance Mandate Before They Were Against It

Conservative Principles Are A Little More Flexible Than First Thought

A lead story in  the Los Angeles Time documents how some leading Republicans and some Conservative Think Tanks were strongly vocal in their support of requiring health insurance for all Americans.

The LA Times on The Health Insurance Mandate.

Here are some of the salient passages from the story.

Until the healthcare law passed last year, requiring medical insurance had a long history as a mainstream GOP idea. . .

Feldstein and Pauly [Conservatives who wrote a 1991 Health Care Reform Proposal] compared mandatory health insurance to requirements to pay for Social Security, auto insurance or workers' compensation.

So too did the Heritage Foundation's Stuart Butler, who in 1989 wrote a health plan that also included an insurance requirement.

"If a young man wrecks his Porsche and has not had the foresight to obtain insurance, we may commiserate, but society feels no obligation to repair his car," Butler told a Tennessee health conference that year.

"But healthcare is different. If a man is struck down by a heart attack in the street, Americans will care for him whether or not he has insurance.… A mandate on individuals recognizes this implicit contract," said Butler, who was the foundation's director of domestic policy studies. . . .

In 1993, however, more than a third of the Senate GOP caucus, including Minority Leader Bob Dole of Kansas, signed on to a proposal by Sen. John Chafee (D-R.I.) to expand health coverage using an insurance requirement.  .  .

Gingrich, who endorsed the idea of mandated coverage in his 2005 and 2008 books, last week told CBS News' "Face the Nation" that the requirement is "unconstitutional both on religious liberty and personal liberty grounds." .  .  .

Former Wyoming Sen. Alan Simpson, a conservative Republican who backed the Chafee bill in 2003, said many in his party seem to have adopted an approach that he described as, "Let's forget what we need to do and see if we can stick it to the Democrats … or stick it to the president."

"Nothing makes sense to me anymore," Simpson said.

The LA Times piece does make mention that even in the early 1990’s there was Conservative Republican opposition to the mandate,

A group of GOP lawmakers rebelled when leading Republican senators started working on healthcare legislation in the early '90s that included an insurance requirement.

Thomas Miller, a resident fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said many senior GOP lawmakers at that time were out of touch with the party base. "That is when RINOs ruled the Earth," he said, using the epithet that conservatives coined to deride party moderates as "Republicans in name only."

So it is not fair to say all Conservatives or Republicans have been inconsistent.  It is fair to ask, however, that if you do not require everyone to have health insurance coverage, how exactly do you propose to pay for those without coverage who are unable to pay their own medical care expenses? 

Freedom in America does not mean freedom to not pay your bills when they come do, as conservative Bush economist Glenn Hubbard has written in the Financial Times, in reference to the debt ceiling,

My wife and I don’t vote on whether we will pay our bills. Rather, we discuss whether our spending or income needs adjustment. So too must it be for our national “family”.