Hope and Fail

Obama flip flops on health care mandate

In a letter to Democratic in the Senate, President Obama says he supports requiring Americans to carry health insurance, a proposal he rejected during the campaign.

From the New York Times:

President Obama said Wednesday that he was receptive to Congressional proposals that would require Americans to have health insurance and oblige employers to share in the cost. But he said there should be exemptions for people who cannot afford insurance and for small businesses in general.

Mr. Obama set forth his views in a letter to the chairmen of the two Senate committees writing health care legislation, Max Baucus of Montana and Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, both Democrats.

The president said he was open to proposals for “shared responsibility — making every American responsible for having health insurance coverage, and asking that employers share in the cost.”

He did not use the terms “individual mandate” and “employer mandate,” which suggest a degree of coercion that Democrats try to avoid implying. Still, the letter provides the fullest statement of Mr. Obama’s views on proposals at the heart of legislation to cover all Americans, his top domestic priority.

“If we are going to make people responsible for owning health insurance, we must make health care affordable,” Mr. Obama wrote. “If we do end up with a system where people are responsible for their own insurance, we need to provide a hardship waiver to exempt Americans who cannot afford it.”

During the Democratic primaries in 2008, Obama attacked Hillary Clinton for proposing a mandate. During their debate in Austin, Texas, he said:

So we’ve got a lot of similarities in our plan. We’ve got a philosophical difference, which we’ve debated repeatedly, and that is that Senator Clinton believes the only way to achieve universal health care is to force everybody to purchase it.

And my belief is, the reason that people don’t have it is not because they don’t want it but because they can’t afford it.

And so I emphasize reducing costs.

… Now, there are legitimate arguments for why Senator Clinton and others have called for a mandate, and I’m happy to have that debate.

But the notion that I am leaving 15 million people out somehow implies that we are different in our goals of providing coverage to all Americans, and that is simply not true. We think that there’s going to be a different way of getting there.

Why the change? If you make insurance companies cover everyone who applies (the elderly, the sick, etc.), someone has to pay for that added risk — the healthy folks who choose to not by insurance. Otherwise, the system wouldn’t be financially sound. At least that’s the reasoning.