At the Fox News presidential forum, Newt Gingrich explained his past support for the individual mandate, as coming from the context of the 1990s political debate.
“Well first of all, the individual mandate was originally developed by the Heritage Foundation and others, as a way to block Hillarycare. And virtually all of us who were conservatives came to the conclusions that it would be more dangerous to implement,” Gingrich said, due to the federal government defining the minimum insurance benefits.
However, Gingrich was supporting the mandate as recently as 2008 — before the Democrats took up the idea — and in 2005 explained how it would function as a “300-million payer system” to defuse direct government control of health care.
