DesideriScuri
Posts: 12225
Joined: 1/18/2012 Status: offline
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ORIGINAL: bounty44 i appreciate that, thank you. that's one of the clips ive seen. while im here, also thank you for some of the links and thoughts above. I read a couple (one i'll quote from) and found some others too. quote:
…it never came to a vote and from what we can tell, plenty of conservative Republicans didn’t like it. In fact, after the bill was introduced, the Senate never took it up again. Even before Chafee brought his bill forward, some conservatives were trying to scuttle it. However, to call it the Republican plan, as though a majority of Republicans endorsed it, goes too far. The House Republicans took a different path, and there was opposition from more hard-line members of the Republican coalition. It is telling that the Chafee bill never became a full blown bill and never came up for a vote. More hard-line senators such as Phil Gramm, R-Texas, House Republicans and the Heritage Foundation saw the Chafee bill as an unacceptable compromise. What they wanted was outright defeat of the president’s approach. http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2013/nov/15/ellen-qualls/aca-gop-health-care-plan-1993/ All that may be true, but, it was still a Republican plan. Not that it truly matters (it's just fodder for political rhetoric, as you know). quote:
the guy who at heritage who put forth the idea of an individual mandate had this to say years afterwards: quote:
“Stuart Butler explains his change of heart on the individual mandate” And Heritage-funded research on federal employees’ coverage — which has no mandate — caused me to conclude we had made a mistake in the 1990s. Additionally, the meaning of the individual mandate we are said to have “invented” has changed over time. Today it means the government makes people buy comprehensive benefits for their own good, rather than our original emphasis on protecting society from the heavy medical costs of free riders... https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/stuart-butler-explains-his-change-of-heart-on-the-individual-mandate/2011/08/25/gIQAnEDptQ_blog.html some of that is echoed in what's below, heavily quoting a person who worked at heritage at the time: quote:
As a junior publicist, we weren't being paid for our personal opinions. But we are now, so you will be the first to know that when we worked at Heritage, we hated the Heritage plan, especially the individual mandate. "Universal health care" was neither already established nor inevitable, and we thought the foundation had made a serious philosophical and strategic error in accepting rather than disputing the left-liberal notion that the provision of "quality, affordable health care" to everyone was a proper role of government. As to the mandate, we remember reading about it and thinking: "I thought we were supposed to be for freedom."… Taranto points out that the Heritage mandate was less onerous than the Obamacare one, as it focused on coverage for catastrophic illness, rather than the comprehensive health plans that Obamacare requires. In the multi-state Obamacare constitutional challenge before the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, in which the individual mandate was overturned, Taranto points out that the Obama Administration cited the Heritage Foundation in its defense of the individual mandate. Heritage, in response, filed an amicus brief accounting for its “prior support for a qualified mandate” and asserting that Heritage has been “consistent” in its view of the constitutionality of a mandate: “ If citations to policy papers were subject to the same rules as legal citations, then the Heritage position quoted by the Department of Justice would have a red flag indicating it had been reversed. . . . Heritage has stopped supporting any insurance mandate. "Heritage policy experts never supported an unqualified mandate like that in the PPACA [ObamaCare]. Their prior support for a qualified mandate was limited to catastrophic coverage (true insurance that is precisely what the PPACA forbids), coupled with tax relief for all families and other reforms that are conspicuously absent from the PPACA. Since then, a growing body of research has provided a strong basis to conclude that any government insurance mandate is not only unnecessary, but is a bad policy option. Moreover, Heritage's legal scholars have been consistent in explaining that the type of mandate in the PPACA is unconstitutional.” [that is, heritage was telling the Obama administration in the courts to knock it off] Here's what I have to say about all that: it's worthless. Unless those quotes were from that point in time, they can be explained off as mere politics. The comments may be 100% accurate, 100% bullshit, or some % of each. There is no way to actually know that. Not a criticism of you, but a criticism of that material (figured you know that, but I'm making it clear, just in case). quote:
and relevant to the conversation here: quote:
UPDATE: John Goodman says: "Did the ideas behind ObamaCare originate at the Heritage Foundation? I would say 'no.' They originated with [Stanford economist] Alain Enthoven. https://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2011/10/20/how-a-conservative-think-tank-invented-the-individual-mandate/#7935ff8b6187 It doesn't really matter if Heritage came up with the idea of the mandate itself or not. It pushed forth a mandate as a response to Hillarycare. That the mandate was a requirement for citizens to get catastrophic care (plus a few other things) matters somewhat, but not all that much. That the HEART Act of 1993 included tax benefits for complying (and I'm not sure what the implications would have been for an individual that wasn't covered by an employer or didn't get coverage if not offered by their employer (or if not employed or if self-employed)). If someone has an idea and you run with it, or bring it to the table, it may as well have been you that came up with it.
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What I support: - A Conservative interpretation of the US Constitution
- Personal Responsibility
- Help for the truly needy
- Limited Government
- Consumption Tax (non-profit charities and food exempt)
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