health ruling thursday

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Originally Posted by ArlJim78

What a load of nonsense. Some Republicans (a small minority) have been for the IM. That doesn't make it a "100% Republican idea", and the idea that this is something that Republicans have been pushing for 25 years is preposterous. Yes some did advocate for it but they were shot down by the majority who wanted no part of it.

The individual mandate was created by the Republican Heritage Foundation, and yes, the Republicans - including the majority leaders, such as Newt - have embraced the individual mandate since they were against the Clinton health care reforms. The insurance industry lobbyists have always supported it (they even have during Obama) The GOP has indeed pushed the mandate very hard during the 1990's and 2000's. It's all about "buy your own insurance, be responsible for yourself".

Yes, the GOP "is" the individual mandate. Democrats always hated it as they considered it a giveaway to the private insurance companies (and why progressives didn't like it when Obama embraced it to try and get something passed for the first time ever)

Every president of the past 60 years had said our health insurance model needed major reform. Finally we have a start.

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As Ezra Klein says:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/busine...w2V_story.html

But permission structures aren’t just for elections. Over the past two years, the Republican Party has slowly been building a permission structure for the five Republicans on the Supreme Court to feel comfortable doing something nobody thought they could do: Violate the existing understanding of the commerce clause and, in perhaps the most significant moment of judicial activism since the New Deal, overturn either all or part of the Affordable Care Act.

The first step was perhaps the hardest: The Republican Party had to take an official and unanimous stand against the constitutionality of the individual mandate. Typically, it’s not that difficult for the opposition party to oppose the least popular element in the majority party’s signature initiative. But the individual mandate was a policy idea Republicans had thought of in the late 1980s and supported for two decades. They had to, in effect, persuade every Republican to say that the policy they had been supporting was an unconstitutional assault on liberty.

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History of the individual mandate

The concept of the individual health insurance mandate is considered to have originated in 1989 at the conservative Heritage Foundation. In 1993, Republicans twice introduced health care bills that contained an individual health insurance mandate. Advocates for those bills included prominent Republicans who today oppose the mandate including Orrin Hatch (R-UT), Charles Grassley (R-IA), Robert Bennett (R-UT), and Christopher Bond (R-MO).

First introduction of the individual mandate:

November, 1993 Consumer Choice Healthy Security Act
Sponsored by Senator Don Nickles (R-OK) & 24 Republican cosponsors

November, 1993 Health Equity and Access Reform Today Act
Sponsored by Senator John H. Chafee (R-RI) & 20 cosponsors (18-R, 2D)

http://healthcarereform.procon.org/v...ourceID=004182