When you’re born you get a ticket to the freak show. When you’re born in America, you get a front row seat.
- George Carlin
There’s a very interesting aspect to the debate of the Afforable Care Act’s individual mandate that Republicans were prefer that you not think about. At all. Ever. Not even a little bit. Really.
The individual mandate is the provision in ACA that would make purchasing health insurance mandatory, the idea being that more people in the insurance pool would spread health care costs across a wider population. Republicans today are decrying the individual mandate as the worst sort of government overreach, an egregious example of Socialist tyranny writ large. How DARE the government require Americans to purchase something they may not want? If they can do that, where will government stop with their mandates? Will we all soon be forced to purchase vanilla ice cream cones? Buy Captain America comic books? Have sex with supermodels? Oh, the horror and the humanity, right?
Except that there’s one teeny, tiny little thing that Republicans are hoping no one mentions…and so far they’re largely getting their way. The problem is that, way back in 1993 during the debate over Hillary Clinton’s proposed health care plan (remember that?), Republicans were all over the individual mandate. They LOVED the idea of requiring Americans to buy health insurance. Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) in particular was front and center pushing for the individual mandate.
Now? Eh, not so much. Now Grassley is front and center decrying the unconstitutionality of requiring Americans to buy health care. How DARE this President (an evil Democrat) force Americans to buy something they may not want? (After all, why should Americans pay for health insurance when we have emergency rooms?) Isn’t forcing Americans to buy health insurance the worst, most oppressive example of Socialist tyranny imaginable?
No hypocrisy here, people. Move along….
PS- If you think that the American system was just fine the way it was before the Affordable Care Act, you might want to read the story of Kenneth McNelly. No one in the largest, most prosperous economy in the world should have to die for lack of money. And yet McNelly’s story is neither unusual nor rare. We live in the largest, most powerful economy in the world…and we’re saddled with a Third World health care delivery system.
WE DESERVE BETTER.
