HEALTH INSURANCE MANDATE BEGAN AS A REPUBLICAN IDEA:
In '90s, GOP Saw An Alternative To Clinton Plan
articles.boston.com
Republicans were for President Obama's requirement that Americans get health insurance before they were against it.
The obligation in the new health care law is a Republican idea that has been around at least two decades. It was once trumpeted as an alternative to Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton's failed health care overhaul in the 1990s. These days, Republicans call it government overreach.
Mitt Romney, weighing another run for the GOP presidential nomination, signed such a requirement into law at the state level as Massachusetts governor in 2006. At the time, Romney defended it as "a personal responsibility principle," and Massachusetts' newest GOP senator, Scott Brown, backed it. Romney now says Obama's plan is a federal takeover that bears little resemblance to what he did as governor and should be repealed....
Not long ago, many of them saw a national mandate as a free-market route to guarantee coverage for all Americans, the answer to liberal ambitions for a government-run entitlement like Medicare. Most specialists agree some requirement is needed in a reformed system because health insurance does not work if people can put off joining the risk pool until they get sick.
In the early 1970s, President Nixon favored a mandate that employers provide insurance. In the 1990s, the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, embraced an individual requirement. Not anymore.
"The idea of an individual mandate as an alternative to single-payer was a Republican idea," said health economist Mark Pauly of the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. In 1991, he published a paper that explained how a mandate could be combined with tax credits -- two ideas that are now part of Obama's law. Pauly's paper was well-received -- by the George H.W. Bush administration.
"It could have been the basis for a bipartisan compromise, but it wasn't," said Pauly. "Because the Democrats were in favor, the Republicans more or less had to be against it."
