GOP not fans of individual mandate…anymore?

Robert Showah

Contributing Writer

The irony is so thick you can choke on it.

It wasn’t long ago that the GOP suggested and even implemented a mandate on health insurance. Yes, these are the same Republicans who are making the argument that fining Americans for not purchasing health insurance is “unconstitutional” as everything anyone opposes seems to be nowadays.

The GOP is no longer “In a Relationship” with individual mandate.

The idea behind the mandate isn’t some liberty-infringing conspiracy the Democrats threw in. Not that Democrats are logical all the time, but here, logic can be found. Let me explain:

Many of the people uninsured are healthy and under the age of 35. They either have jobs that do not offer health insurance or they just decided not to pay for health insurance because they were so sure that they wouldn’t get sick. Having this pool of young and healthy people, however, spreads the risk.

What any of these people could do is they could simply sign up for health insurance only when they got sick, which would mean only sick people would be paying for premiums while running up staggering bills. In this example, there would be no need for a healthy person to purchase insurance, which spells financial disaster for insurance companies.

So that’s the logic behind a mandate. Depending on your interpretation of the United States Constitution – because it isn’t an explicit document that authorizes or prohibits an infinite amount of things – one can bend and skew words, commas, semi-colons, and phrases into an endless abyss of self-fulfilling prophecy.

In fact, guess who wasn’t so steadfast about the mandate? President Obama.

During his presidential campaign Irwin Redlener, a physician at Columbia University and adviser to Obama said, “I’m not sure how ready the country is politically to accept the overall mandate.”

Bare in mind, this was before the mandate was such a horrific idea.

In 2006, then-Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, perhaps better known as the runner-up in the 2008 Republican presidential primary, signed into law health-care reform that required all Bay Staters to purchase health insurance or pay a fine. As of September 2009, Massachusetts reduced its uninsured rate from 5.7 percent in 2006 to 4.1 percent three years later.

Romney wrote in the Wall Street Journal in 2006:

“Some of my libertarian friends balk at what looks like an individual mandate. But remember, someone has to pay for the health care that must, by law, be provided: Either the individual pays or the taxpayers pay. A free ride on government is not libertarian.

And today, Romney denies that the federal law is similar to the Massachusetts law.

The legal battle over this is at best frivolous and will test the non-partisan steel of judges in our court system. Seeing as the U.S. Constitution was written over 200 years ago, anyone with a decent understanding of the scholarly debate that goes on over punctuation in this document knows that nothing in the Constitution is ever clearly constitutional or unconstitutional.