Liberals Once Hated the Individual Mandate
Some still do:
There’s a lot of talk—much of it inaccurate—about the minority of conservatives who supported the individual mandate in the past, but oppose ObamaCare’s requirement that all Americans buy health insurance. But these critics have devoted less attention to the fact that many liberals—including President Obama—opposed the individual mandate in the past. “The liberals hated it,” notes Jonathan Gruber in a recent New York Times profile. “People forget that.”
Full Avik Roy post worth reading.
What goes around comes around. Maybe someday, conservatives will hate the free market system, and liberals love it. The liberals love it when the Supreme Court makes up penumbras and eminations, but hate it when they follow the constitution. A strange world indeed.
The fact that they hated it years ago and like it now shows that they like it now partly because it’s a step toward giving them the level of control they’ve been seeking over an industry.
In the liberals mind, the individual mandate makes their legislation work. They have to like it because they know they need it to make it work
There’s no honor among thieves.
Progressives from the far Left hate private insurance in general. They would prefer a Medicare for All scheme, where care is free at the point of service, rationing is based on waiting and premiums are a function of income.
I think many liberals would prefer a single-payer system, but were willing to compromise because they saw the mandate as a potential solution that would have bipartisan support (based on previous stances taken by a number of Republican congressmen), while single-payer didn’t have sufficient support. However, it was at that same time that many Republicans conveniently decided that that mandate was no longer a good idea, but instead, unconstitutional tyranny.
I think the liberals conveniently decided that the mandate was a good idea to accomplish their policy designs regardless of the constitutionality and get something passed to give a President with no history of accomplishing anything policy wise something to run on for the next term, and many conservatives saw the mistake of supporting the mandate in the past and hoped that President Obama would be consistent in his criticisms of the mandate from his election campaign and not support a bill with a mandate in it.
Oh well – I guess the only policies that matter are the ones that keep you elected or allow you to attack the “other side” – good policy be damned.
Hypocrisy. I’m shocked.