The individual mandate, a Republican idea which shows how far to the right the Dems have gone [View all]

[MadHound]

Yes, we all know that the Affordable Care Act has deep roots in the plan put forth by Republican Mitt Romney. Some of the more historically astute among us might even know that the ACA can trace its beginnings back to another Republican, Richard Nixon. But it gets worse. It turns out that the most contentious part of the ACA, the individual mandate, originated with George H. W. Bush. Yep, the individual mandate is the child of Pappy Bush.

"The idea of an individual mandate to control health care costs, however, is not new. It goes back to 1989 and a man named Mark Pauly. An expert on health care policy, Pauly was part of a group of academics brought to the White House by President George H.W. Bush.

The group's task was to fix health care; its solution was to let the marketplace solve it and create an individual mandate. Pauly tells weekends on All Things Considered host Guy Raz that, at the time, many Republicans, including the president, loved the idea.

"Legislation was drafted, but never made it as a bill because the word from the Democrats in Congress was [that] it would be dead on arrival," Pauly says."
http://www.npr.org/2012/03/31/149767228/how-did-the-health-care-mandate-get-here

I think that last quote is telling. Democrats in Congress at the time overwhelmingly opposed the individual mandate, for good reason.

Let's compare that to today. Democrats, from the president on down, have embraced the individual mandate as an essential part of their Nixon-cum-Romney-cum-Obamacare.

Let me spell that out for you. Democrats of today are embracing a Republican policy that their predecessors roundly rejected just twenty three years ago. Worse, they are embracing this mandate under the rubric of a health care reform policy whose own origins lie deep within the Republican party.

This starkly shows how far to the right the Democratic party has moved. What once was a Republican policy that Democrats rejected has now become the cornerstone for a law that is essentially a Republican attempt at health care reform. This is not progressive, not by any stretch of the imagination. Rather, it is quite regressive, and signifies another rightward shift of the Democratic party.

I know, I know, this post will be swarmed by people defending the ACA and the individual mandate. Remember though, those defenders that you see, both in this thread and elsewhere on this board, are defending a Republican idea, defending a policy that Democrats once rejected. What they are defending, in essence, is the ongoing rightward shift of the Democratic party, where yesterday's Republican policies are now today's Democratic laws.

How sad is that.