Tag: Individual Mandate

After Railing against the Individual Mandate for Years, Top Teabagger Jim DeMint Quits Senate to Lead Organization That Invented the Individual Mandate

Jon Ponder

In 2009, not long after Pres. Obama and the Democrats opted to forgo the single-payer option for health-insurance reform and go instead with the conservatives’ option of mandating that individuals must buy insurance from insurance corporations, the right wing abruptly disavowed their own plan, even going so far as to label it “socialism” and demonize it by referring to it as Obamacare.

Few pols and propagandists were more persistent in pushing the false narrative that Obamacare and its individual mandate were jack-booted socialism than the top teabagger in the Senate, Jim DeMint of South Carolina. Now, in one of those ironic turns in politics that you couldn’t possibly make up, DeMint has announced he is resigning from the Senate to run the same right-wing “thimk” tank that invented the individual mandate back in 1993, the Heritage Foundation.

[…]

Gingrich on Individual Mandate in 2005: ‘I’m in Favor of 300 Million-Payer System’

Jon Ponder

“I am very opposed to a single-payer system,” Newt Gingrich says in the video above, “but I’m actually in favor of a 300 million payer system.” The “300 million payer system” he referred to then has come to be known now as the “individual mandate,” or, alternately, “Obamacare’s Kenyan socialist boot on the neck of freedom.”

Gingrich continues, “Because one of my conclusions in the last six years, and founding the Center for Health Transformation, and looking at the whole system is, unless you have a hundred percent coverage, you can’t have the right preventive care, and you can’t have a rational system, because the cost-shifts are so irrational, and create second-order problems.”

Gingrich made these remarks in 2005 at the annual “Health Care Ceasefire,” on a panel with then-Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) and the moderator, former Louisiana Sen. John Breaux (DINO).

It should be pointed out that the individual mandate was developed by the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing thimk tank, as an alternative to a single-payer, Medicare-for-everyone system, which would virtually put the health insurance industry — a key source of funding for the Republican Party — out of business.

Like Mitt Romney, Gingrich supported the individual mandate until the Democrats incorporated it into the Affordable Care Act.

Partial transcript:

[…]