GOODY TWO SHOES: In Obamaspeak Individual Responsibility = Collective Duty
The Washington Post notes that Judge Henry Hudson’s finding that the individual mandate to buy health insurance is unconstitutional puts President Barack Hussein Obama in the awkward position of defending an idea to which he had professed to be adamantly opposed:
As a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, Obama insisted that the health-care reform plans of his rivals were misguided, because they envisioned forcing Americans to buy health insurance or risk a fine. Over and over, he said on the campaign trail that such a mandate was unnecessary.
"My belief is - is that if we make [insurance] affordable, if we provide subsidies to those who can't afford it, they will buy it," Obama put it during a January 2008 debate in Los Angeles against fellow candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton, who favored a mandate. …
Obama embraced the mandate after he moved into the White House and placed an overhaul of the nation's health system at the top of his domestic agenda. Eager to avoid the strategy that had helped doom President Clinton's health reform efforts of the 1990s, the White House refrained from producing a detailed road map, deferring to Democrats in Congress to write a plan. House and Senate Democrats preferred the idea of an insurance mandate, to take effect in 2014, and the president went along.
While Obama now parrots the insurance industry line that increasing the number of Americans who have health insurance is possible only if the insurance pool includes both healthy people and those with pre-existing conditions – and, more importantly, people in the first group must be forced to buy insurance to make sure they don’t wait until they are in the second group - The New York Times reports that not everyone agrees:
In the wake of the decision Monday, which held that the individual mandate was unconstitutional, some lawmakers and some consumer advocates are investigating possible alternatives.
“I am not a big fan of the individual mandate,” said Senator Ben Nelson, Democrat of Nebraska, who voted reluctantly for the health legislation.
Mr. Nelson said he had asked the Government Accountability Office, an investigative arm of Congress, to identify possible alternatives and to analyze how effective they would be in extending coverage to the uninsured.
Jamie Court, the president of Consumer Watchdog, a liberal advocacy group, said, “The health insurance purchase mandate is not necessary for health care reform to work.” Indeed, Mr. Court said, it was “a sop to health insurance companies,” which guarantees they will have millions of new customers, without a firm cap on how much they can charge.
One alternative to the individual mandate would create financial incentives for people to buy insurance. For example, health policy experts said, insurers could offer discounts to people who sign up early, and they could increase premiums for people who delay enrollment. Medicare imposes such late-enrollment penalties on some people who delay signing up for Part B, which covers doctors’ services, and Part D, which covers prescription drugs.
Another approach would be for insurers to limit enrollment to one or two months a year, so that consumers could not sign up on the spur of the moment, when they need care.
Here’s how that bit that The Stiletto boldfaced would work in the real world to discourage people from buying health insurance only after they become sick: Say you’re a preschool teacher in New Hampshire and your employer doesn’t offer health insurance. You’re not making that much money and are saving up for, say, a new car or a down payment on a condo or the wedding of your dreams, so you opt not to buy your own policy. Then you have the bad luck to be diagnosed with an aggressive form of lymphoma, and this is when you get your priorities straight and decide you’d be better off spending your savings on an insurance policy to pay for several rounds of chemotherapy costing $16,000 each.
Believe it or not, this very person - Gail O'Brien (and others like her who are the reason why the rest of us will be forced, instead of incentivized, to buy health insurance) is spotlighted by Attorney General Eric Holder and Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius in a Washington Post op-ed to make the case that lawsuits challenging the “individual responsibility provision” of the Affordable Care Ac are “troubling”:
Imagine what would happen if everyone waited to buy car insurance until after they got in an accident.
But we don’t have to imagine it, because Holder and Sibelius tell us:
O’Brien “knows that in 2014 insurers will be banned from discriminating against her or any American with preexisting conditions.”
In other words, she waited to buy car health insurance until after she got into an accident sick, and the rest of us are getting stuck with her tab.
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