This story comes from our partner 
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Opposition to the administration’s overhaul of health care has almost become an article of faith with every Republican running for president.
Candidates promise to repeal the law and its less-than-popular requirement for most Americans to either have health insurance or to pay a penalty starting in 2014.
“It is wrong for health care. It’s wrong for the American people. It’s unconstitutional. And I’m absolutely adamantly opposed to ObamaCare,” former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney said at a debate in Des Moines, Iowa, earlier this month.
“I am for the repeal of Obamacare,” former House Speaker Newt Gingrich echoes in a video on his website. “And I’m against any effort to impose a federal mandate on anyone, because it is fundamentally wrong and I believe, unconstitutional.”
By now, it’s pretty common knowledge that both candidates once supported the so-called individual mandate that’s at the heart of the federal health law. That kind of mandate is also at the heart of the law that Romney signed as governor of Massachusetts in 2006.
At the time, a newsletter from Gingrich’s former consulting firm, the Center for Health Transformation, praised Romney’s state health law, as The Wall Street Journal noted this week. “We agree entirely with Governor Romney and Massachusetts legislators that our goal should be 100% insurance coverage for all Americans,” the newsletter said.
And a video from 2008 has surfaced that shows Gingrich explaining why an individual insurance mandate makes sense.
At the Des Moines debate earlier this month, Gingrich agreed that he had supported the idea when he fought President Clinton’s health overhaul plan.
“In 1993, in fighting HillaryCare, virtually every conservative saw the mandate as a less dangerous future than what Hillary was trying to do,” he said.
That may be the case. But it’s also the case that, until quite recently, both Gingrich and Romney still favored the idea of requiring people to have insurance.
“I’ve said consistently we ought to have some requirement that you either have health insurance or you post a bond … or in some way you indicate you’re going to be held accountable,” Gingrich said on NBC’s Meet the Press just this past May. When host David Gregory asked if that wasn’t simply an individual mandate, Gingrich replied, “it’s a variation on it.”
Meanwhile, former Governor Romney, who continues to defend his state’s individual mandate, has maintained recently that he wouldn’t support extending it nationwide. But that’s not what he said at the end of March 2010, just days after the federal bill became law, in an interview at Vanderbilt University comparing the two.
“The similarities are that we have an incentive for people to become insured, and the incentive works; we have 98 percent of our citizens in Massachusetts that are insured,” he said in the video. “So that’s working.”
Romney went on to say he actually wouldn’t repeal the entire federal law, but, rather, “repeal the bad, and keep the good.”
So why the late turnaround?
“You know, it’s hard for me to not to be cynical about this, frankly,” says Patricia Danzon. She’s a professor of health care management at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.
She’s also a co-inventor of the individual mandate back in the late 1980s as one of a quartet of free-market academics. It’s the plan that ultimately became the Republican alternative to President Clinton’s proposal.
“Our objective was to try to design a health care system that would rely on competitive markets to provide the insurance, but would achieve universal coverage,” Danzon said. “And would do it in a way that is as efficient as possible, meaning not cost more in tax revenue than is necessary, but also be reasonably fair and equitable.”
Oh, and not have the government run it.
This, was happening at a time when the main Democratic plan was to require employers to provide coverage. Conservative economists frowned on that, because they said it distorted the labor market.
But having everyone covered did remain a key goal. Why? Danzon says it’s neither a liberal nor a conservative thing, but purely an economic one.
“The truth is that we’re not so mean-spirited that we deny people health care when they truly need it,” she explains. “And so people who don’t have insurance do get coverage if they desperately need it in an emergency situation, and that ends up being a burden on everybody else.”
In other words, making individuals responsible for their own health care is preferable to socializing the health care system.
Or, as Romney put it in an interview on MSNBC just last week, “personal responsibility is more conservative, in my view, than something being given out for free by government.”
Romney once again made the case in that interview for why requiring individuals to have health insurance was — and is — a conservative idea. But now that such a mandate has been embraced by President Obama — and proved unpopular with voters — don’t expect to see Republican presidential candidates doing much beyond just saying no.
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Try as I may to be objective, one word kept creeping into my mind as I was reading this article about Mitt and Newt…
Hypocrites!
Mitt and Newt had this idea way before President Obama ever decided to run for President. However, like children, because they didn’t get the credit for getting it passed and enacted, now it’s sour grapes. Newt was Speaker of the House. You would think that someone that powerful and in such a position of leadership could have gotten the individual mandate passed and enacted back in the 1990s. At least Mitt got the job done when he was Governor. If you ask me, the candidate with the most leadership is Mitt. He actually got health care reform enacted into law in Massachusetts. As Speaker of the House, Newt got nothing done with regard to health care. Which one shows more leadership? If you ask me, Mitt would be a much better President that cry baby Newt!
It amazes me how partisan politics and a chase for popularity with the extreme ideas of any political party can trump common sense. Only a complete moron would argue against the idea that in order for our health care system to work, every American must have skin in the game because it is inevitable that every American will require health care services at some point in their life. Even if they drop dead, they still need the services of a doctor to declare them dead and sign the death certificate. So, doesn’t it follow that every American be required to be responsible for the medical costs that they will inevitably incur? Why should the responsible people pay for the free loaders? Newt and Mitt once strongly supported the idea of individual mandates. Mitt even got individual mandates passed and enacted into the Massachusetts health care law. Mitt and Newt agreed, as did many other sane and reasonable Republicans, that mandated health care insurance, on an individual case basis, was the correct way to hold individuals accountable in our society and make sure that citizens own up to their individual responsibilities. Now, because the Tea Party insists that mandates are unconstitutional and because Mitt and Newt are trying like heck to win votes, all of a sudden mandated insurance is an extreme left wing idea. Geez! How absurd is that? Talk about the mother of all flip-flops? When Mitt and Newt went 180 degrees in the opposite direction on individual mandates, someone should have given both of them some sort of award. Talk about hypocrites!
Someone should hold these candidates accountable. They excuse flip-flopping as merely a learning process. Trouble is, the electorate usually doesn’t repeatedly “learn’ that often. We vote for or against a specific candidate based upon what that candidate says. If tomorrow, they can do a 180 degree reversal, they basically lied to us. I can think of candidates in the 2010 election that promised not to vote for the Paul Ryan 2012 Budget because it would end traditional Medicare and traditional Social Security. Then, based on that position, they get elected and go to Congress. Once in Congress they vote with the caucus regardless of their promises at home. My Congressman did that. He told us he would not support the Ryan 2012 Budget Plan. Then he went to Congress and voted with the GOP caucus for the Ryan plan. Guess what? He comes up for re-election in November 2012. His re-election hopes are virtually non-existant because of his Ryan vote! We can’t vote for people that flip-flop. It’s that simple. I admire Ron Paul for his solid position on the issues. I may not agree with Ron Paul about everything he stands for, but he “never” flip-flops! Ron Paul is as solid as a rock! Same with Rick Santorum! Both of these GOP candidates are solid as a rock and never change their position on the issues. Santorum and Paul tell it like it is and live with the results!
I agree! Ron Paul and Rick Santorum don’t change their position for political convenience. They hold values that don’t change. I don’t happen to agree 100 percent with any candidate’s position on certain issues, but I do admire that Santorum and Paul will take a stand and stick with it. Michelle Bachmann has some of those qualities too. As far are the rest of the field? They are controlled by the polls. They will switch positions at the drop of the hat if they see that they can gain support in the polls from switching. Their handlers focus keenly on polls. Then, they advise their candidate to take a position based on those polls. It should be the opposite. They should take a position and stick with it. Just look at Perry and the abortion issue. Just look at Newt and the individual mandate issue. As governor, Mitt got the individual mandate passed and enacted in Massachusetts. Over 66 percent of the citizens of Massachusetts approve of the individual mandate. Yet, because the Tea Party says they hate the individual mandate, now Mitt hates the individual mandate. Amazing! Simply amazing!