A Heritage Foundation director named Stuart Butler presented a paper in 1989 which contains the idea of the healthcare mandate, backed up by some of the absurd reasoning many of us had been attacking in the debate over the Senate healthcare bill, for example, the analogy between car insurance and health insurance.
The link to the full paper is here.
And here's an excerpt on the mandate:
This paragraph sounds like a Newt Gingrich talking point.
Boobs like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity incessantly promote the Heritage Foundation to their audiences, while claiming the mantle of conservatism. But as we all come to learn sooner or later, saying doesn't make it so.
Government compulsion continues to be the nexus of political conflict in America. Unfortunately for us, the Republican establishment is for it as much as our enemies on the left.
For more, regrettably, see here:
For more, regrettably, see here:
It wouldn't have been at all odd for any of these Republicans to support the individual mandate in the past, because it was a Republican idea, hatched by Stuart Butler and some others at the Heritage Foundation. (Documentation here.) Heritage has desperately tried to disavow it, but to no avail. Even James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal, apparently present at the creation, concedes the point. You sometimes hear conservatives defend their past support for the individual mandate by saying that something was needed to head off more ambitious health insurance schemes like Hillarycare, but that's another way of saying that whenever a conservative proposes any solution to the health care crisis he or she does so in bad faith. Vote Republican if you like, but don't kid yourself that a Republican president would replace Obamacare with anything at all. Not even Romney would. You might even say especially Romney, since the issue has brought him nothing but grief since the 2012 cycle began.
