United Liberty

For what it’s worth, I’m opposed to the individual mandate in ObamaCare. I believe it’s a violation of the Commerce Clause for the Congress to compel anyone to purchase a certain product. However, many conservatives are now faced with explaining why they once backed the individual mandate, but now oppose it. Over at Forbes, Avik Roy explains:

As far as I have been able to find, Stuart’s [Heritage health-policy chief Stuart Butler] 1989 brief is the first published proposal of an individual mandate in the context of private-sector-managed health systems. In 1991, Mark Pauly and others developed a proposal for George H.W. Bush that also included an individual mandate. While others credit Stanford economist Alain Enthoven with the idea, Enthoven’s earliest published reference to an individual mandate was an indirect one in the 1992 Jackson Hole paper.

In 1992 and 1993, some Republicans in Congress, seeking an alternative to Hillarycare, used these ideas as a foundation for their own health-reform proposals. One such bill, the Health Equity and Access Reform Today Act of 1993, or HEART, was introduced in the Senate by John Chafee (R., R.I.) and co-sponsored by 19 other Senate Republicans, including Christopher Bond, Bob Dole, Chuck Grassley, Orrin Hatch, Richard Lugar, Alan Simpson, and Arlen Specter. Given that there were 43 Republicans in the Senate of the 103rd Congress, these 20 comprised nearly half of the Republican Senate Caucus at that time. The HEART Act proposed health insurance vouchers for low-income individuals, along with an individual mandate.

Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum, who were both House backbenchers in 1993, were also in favor of an individual mandate in those days. (Gingrich continued to support a federal individual mandate as recently as May of last year. We don’t know much about the timing of Santorum’s change of heart.)

It would seem that 1990s conservatives weren’t concerned with the constitutional implications of allowing Congress to force people to buy a private product. “I don’t remember that being raised at all,” Mark Pauly told Ezra Klein last year. “The way it was viewed by the Congressional Budget Office in 1994 was, effectively, as a tax…So I’ve been surprised by that argument.”

We’ve previously pointed out Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum’s support of the individual mandate. It appears Gingrich supported the policy up until at least May of last year. He now says he was wrong.

Of course, this doesn’t change the fact that the individual mandate is a bad idea, though unfortunately, it does takeaway from conservative arguments against it in some respect. While Heritage may have supported it at one point, other think tanks, such as the Cato Institute, have been fighting it for years.

It is about consistency, however, and conservatives’ lack thereof.