Is it an accident that both Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney have come out of the gate stumbling over whether there’s a place for individual mandates in reforming America’s dysfunctional health care system?
To some degree, yes. And Romney made his policy bed years ago while Gingrich’s statements on Meet the Press seemed to have been the most flagrant sort of unforced error. But there’s no getting around the fact that both have been part of actual national policy debates going back for a number of years — unlike most of the other Republican candidates on offer. And if you really want to get everyone insured and costs controlled (two sides of the same coin, really), there are only two real basic options: a single payer national health care plan or some system that requires everyone to buy into the health care system. In other words, unless you want to go the potent persuasion route with 300+ million Americans one by one, individual health care mandates.
As many disgruntled single-payer advocates have been saying for the last couple years, in structural terms President Obama’s health care plan really comes out of Republican policy circles, trying to find a way to address the key problems of the system without going the single payer route.
Certainly not all conservatives ever endorsed such a model. Far from it. But it’s only in the white hot mania of 2009 and 2010 that anyone seriously thought that such an approach was unconstitutional or the new 21st century version of slavery.
