The Trunk

The Mandate

That’s astonishingly unfair. I’m not a fan of the mandate either (I’m not a fan of guaranteed issue, for that matter) but we need to acknowledge where this comes from. “The Democrats” (as if they’re a Borg Collective) generally supported an individual mandate as a compromise short of single payer. During the Presidential campaign Obama was the only one not to support a mandate. This is him compromising to match the will of the rest of his party, nothing else.

I’m not buying this. When Obama campaigned against Clinton, the issue of the mandate was the single biggest policy difference between them. He campaigned as if this difference mattered. He campaigned as if this were an issue of principle. For him to jettison this in his first year in office is atrocious. This isn’t a compromise he needed to make with the rest of his party—it’s a compromise he chose to make with the insurance companies that donated lots of money to his party.

The debate over health care has been raging for decades. This imposed mandate is something relatively new and absolutely awful. It’s also, most likely, unconstitutional. But we shouldn’t have to resort to the courts to protect our rights … we should be able to turn to our leaders. Obama failed us in this regard.

Source: jeffmiller