In a blog post regarding the recent passage of the health care reform bill and the firing of Republican David Frum from the American Enterpise Institute, Paul Krugman writes
I find this quite believable; back in 2003 Stuart Butler of the Heritage Foundation, which is supposedly harder-right than AEI, proposed a health care reform consisting of … drumroll … an individual mandate coupled with subsidies to make insurance affordable. In short, Obamacare.
via David Frum, AEI, Heritage And Health Care – Paul Krugman Blog – NYTimes.com.
What is ironic about the health care bill (and indeed, even the proposed cap&trade legislation) is that they are at heart conservative ideas. The stereotypical “liberal” idea would have been to have government-run healthcare, with doctors working for the government. Instead, this health bill expands private health care to everyone.
In fact, from a purely conservative standpoint, the health care reform means we’ll have less “socialism”, not more. Currently, everyone already has healthcare, just not everyone has to pay for it. It’s called the ER. It doesn’t matter whether you have insurance or not, you get to go. How is that not “socialism”? Expanding healthcare (and enforcing the individual mandate) just means having everyone pay their fair share for the implicit guaranteed (albeit highly inefficient) universal health care system that already exists.
The bottom line is, no one likes the crappy “pre-existing condition” exclusions that currently exist in insurance policies. But (as conservative pointed out years ago) to get rid of those exclusions in any sensible way, there must be an individual mandate so that people get health insurance before they get sick. There is really no way around that in order to have a functioning, privately-run health care system.
