That mandate was also a prominent feature of the Massachusetts plan passed under Gov. Mitt Romney in 2006. According to Romney, “we got the idea of an individual mandate from [Newt Gingrich], and [Newt] got it from the Heritage Foundation,” Forbes reports. Furthermore, as Bill Keller argued in an op-ed for The New York Times,
the GOP should be “the people who ought to be most vigorously
applauding this success story” because the reform of the United States’s
“overpriced, underperforming health care system” was done almost
entirely with market incentives instead of government decree.
The fact that the idea of the individual mandate developed
out of GOP rhetoric proves that the party is not opposed to the thought
of making insurance affordable to millions of Americans. “Many states
now require passengers in automobiles to wear seat-belts for their own
protection,” Stuart Butler, a health care expert for the
conservative-leaning Heritage Foundation, wrote in a 1989 brief titled Assuring Affordable Health Care for All Americans.
“Many others require anybody driving a car to have liability insurance.
But neither the federal government nor any state requires all
households to protect themselves from the potentially catastrophic costs
of a serious accident or illness.”
So the argument goes that just as legally mandated
insurance makes economic sense for automobiles, it makes sense for
health care, as well.
Several theories as to why Republicans want to see Obamacare defunded and repealed have been tossed around.
Republicans have said that the health care reform will
destroy the economy. “Well, if you don’t believe Obamacare is the
biggest job killer in the country, look to the facts,” Republican Rep.
Ted Cruz of Texas said during his 21-hour speech on the Senate floor
earlier this month. “This year, report after report has rolled in about
employers restricting work hours to less than 30 hours per week — the
point where the mandate kicks in. The data also points to record-low
workweeks in low-wage industries.”
But for most companies, the employer mandate is not a huge
burden. The companies that do not provide insurance and will be required
to probably employ around 1 percent of American workers.
The theory put forward by Keller in his op-ed and by Eduardo Porter in his New York Times
piece entitled “Why the Health Care Law Scares the G.O.P.” is that
Republicans are worried that Americans will like the benefits of the
reform too much. “You have probably figured out that the real mission of
the Republican extortionists and their big-money backers was to scuttle the law before most Americans recognized it as a godsend and rendered it politically untouchable,” Keller wrote.
That argument makes sense to some degree. Speaking to radio
host Rush Limbaugh in late August, Cruz said that President Obama
“wants to get as many Americans as possible addicted to the subsidies,
addicted to the sugar, because he knows that in modern times, no major
entitlement has ever been implemented and then unwound.”
But in Keller’s opinion, it is too late. Health care reform
has already accomplished its first goal of enrolling millions of
uninsured Americans, “many of whom have been living one medical
emergency away from the poorhouse,” he wrote in the op-ed. The fact that
the computer glitches that plagued the first week the exchanges were
open for enrollment was evidence of demand for affordable coverage. This
demand “is the 90 percent of the story that doesn’t make the
headlines,” Sam Glick of the Oliver Wyman consulting firm told Keller.
[1488 comments so far..]
No comments:
Post a Comment