The GOP’s “inconvenient truth” about the individual health insurance mandate

Yesterday I wrote about the ruling by U.S. District Judge Henry Hudson striking down the individual mandate provision of the health care reform legislation passed by Democrats and signed into law by President Barack Obama. Predictably, Republicans were quick to laud the decision, but today I thought we all could take a trip down memory lane when it comes to an individual health insurance mandate. Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah was among those Republicans lauding Judge Hudson’s decision, saying, “Today is a great day for liberty.” Sen. Hatch added, “Congress must obey the Constitution rather than make it up as we go along. Liberty requires limits on government, and today those limits have been upheld.”

While Sen. Hatch circa 2010 thinks an individual health insurance mandate is an unconstitutional overreach by government, the Orrin Hatch of the 1990s was singing a different tune, as Sen. Hatch and several other Senators who now oppose the individual mandate actually supported a bill that would have required such a mandate.

And as Steve Benen of The Washington Monthly points out, the individual health insurance mandate was an idea first proposed by Republicans, not Democrats:

The record here may be inconvenient for the right, but it’s also unambiguous: the mandate Republicans currently hate was their idea. It was championed by the Heritage Foundation. It was part of Bob Dole’s 1996 presidential campaign platform*. Nixon embraced it in the 1970s, and George H.W. Bush kept it going in the 1980s.

For years, it was touted by the likes of John McCain, Mitt Romney, Scott Brown, Chuck Grassley, Bob Bennett, Tommy Thompson, Lamar Alexander, Lindsey Graham, John Thune, Judd Gregg, and many others all notable GOP officials.

My personal favorite is Grassley, who proclaimed on Fox News last year, during the fight over Obama’s plan, “I believe that there is a bipartisan consensus to have an individual mandate.” (A year later, Grassley signed onto a legal brief insisting that the mandate is unconstitutional.)

Clearly Sen. Orrin Hatch was against liberty before he was for it, but his flip-flop on the individual health insurance mandate is hardly surprising, given that he has to cater to far-right “Tea Party” conservatives in advance of his reelection campaign in 2012.

Share:

Related Articles

2 thoughts on “The GOP’s “inconvenient truth” about the individual health insurance mandate

Comments are closed.