Republicans are screaming that Obamacare’s mandates are a “stunning assault on liberty,” as one put it. That’s ironic, since Richard Nixon, Bob Dole, and Bill Frist all embraced the idea.
The new mandate requiring Americans to buy health insurance is “the most egregious, unconstitutional legislation that we can remember,” said South Carolina Republican Attorney General Henry McMaster. He is among more than a dozen state attorneys general who have filed a lawsuit asking the courts to declare the mandate unconstitutional because it is “an unprecedented encroachment” on the rights of both individuals and the states by the federal government. The political scrum that’s erupted over the mandate plan is deeply ironic—given that the idea has been warmly embraced by elements of the right since at least the early 1970s.
Far from the “stunning assault on liberty” decried by Arizona Sen. Jon Kyl, the individual mandate is partially traceable to conservative embrace of an anti-Medicare, pro-free-market health-reform agenda. President Nixon’s Office of Management and Budget Director Caspar Weinberger believed that providing insurance to all Americans was a worthy goal, for instance. At the same time, he opposed reforms that would expand a government-run health-care system. So, as Daily Beast contributor Adam Clymer recounts in his fine biography of Sen. Ted Kennedy, Weinberger proposed a “solution” that would put the burden on employers “by requiring them to insure their workers.” This was an “employer mandate,” and it appealed to Weinberger among others because it ensured that health care in America would remain in the hands of the private sector, not fall under control of Washington.
The bombastic rhetoric characterizing mandates as the end of liberty and the lawsuit filed by the attorneys general have a hypocritical, hyperbolic cast about them.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-03-24/the-gops-dirty-health-care-secret/