May 31, 2011 10:48 PM UTC

Forget What I Said Yesterday--Mandates Are Bad Today!

•  
• by: Colorado Pols

As the Los Angeles Times reports:

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney has renounced it. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich says he doesn’t believe in it anymore. Former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman has brushed off suggestions he even considered it.

As the three have discovered, there is hardly a bigger black mark against a Republican presidential candidate today than the hint of past support for requiring Americans to get health insurance – as President Obama’s new healthcare law mandates.

But Republicans were not always so hostile. Until the healthcare law passed last year, requiring medical insurance had a long history as a mainstream GOP idea…

[T]he Heritage Foundation’s Stuart Butler…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.

As reported very well in this story, an “individual mandate” to carry health insurance, which was the ogre of last year’s failed Amendment 63 in Colorado as well as this year’s unsuccessful legislative attempt to pull Colorado out of federally-administered health care programs, was the central component of the 1993 GOP alternative measure to Bill Clinton’s health reform legislation. The fact that Republicans now declare something they once backed to be a grave threat to liberty isn’t just confusing to you–former GOP Sen. Alan Simpson:

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.” [Pols emphasis]

“Nothing makes sense to me anymore,” Simpson said.

And you know what? If any of these former mandate proponents wins the GOP presidential nomination, their health care flip-flops won’t make sense to the American people, either. We’ve already heard about a strategic shift by Republicans away from health care as an issue, a flight to safety gaining momentum as Republicans come under withering fire for their Medicare-privatizing 2012 budget proposal. But after the extreme rhetoric against “Obamacare” and the type of electorate roused in 2010 by it, we just don’t see how the GOP can divorce itself from its hopelessly conflicted history on the matter–in particular these candidates, like “front-runner” Mitt Romney, whose attempts to back away from Massachusetts’ mandated health insurance fall somewhere between “typical politician” and “totally ridiculous.”

A real danger exists that in trying to rewrite his own history, somebody like Romney could convince American voters, once and for all, that Republicans really don’t stand for anything.