The Individual Mandate: "Stunning Assault on Liberty" or "Ultimate Conservative Idea"?

"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds," Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote. A foolish inconsistency, however, is somewhat the norm in congressional committee-room debates. Thus it is that the hyperbolic rhetoric against elements of health reform is flowing like a mighty stream within the Senate Finance Committee mark-up. Some of the toughest language we're hearing from Republicans focuses on the individual mandate -- the requirement that adults must purchase health insurance or pay a fine if they opt not to. It's a potent political talking point: who likes to be required to do anything? But it's also poetic justice for a policy once hailed as "the ultimate conservative idea."

The policy seems more controversial than it is. You may remember throughout 2007 and 2008 that the individual mandate was the most contentious policy in the health care reform debate between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Clinton's plan had a mandate. Obama's didn't. That somehow yielded twenty debates' worth of beating the hell out of each other... enough that I'm getting flashbacks just typing this post. But that too was more about politics than policy. After all, President Obama now advocates a mandate. There's also one in the House bill, the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Bill, and various other health care bills (including the bipartisan Wyden-Bennett Act, which 5 Republican Senators have signed onto). An individual mandate is the number one principle of America's Health Insurance Plans own manifesto for reform (natch). Back when Ted Kennedy had his closed-door sessions with representatives from the health care industry, it was the one element everyone agreed on. Economists, including the liberal Paul Krugman, point out that any plan without a mandate "would also face the problem of healthy people who decide to take their chances or don't sign up until they develop medical problems, thereby raising premiums for everyone else."

What's funny to me while listening to Jon Kyl thunder that the individual mandate is a "stunning assault on liberty" or Chuck Grassley proclaim "Individuals should maintain their freedom to chose health-care coverage, or not," isn't that this represents a flip-flop for both gentlemen. Kyl was in the room with all the other Republican Senate Finance Committee members months ago when Max Baucus publicly asked if anyone disagreed with the notion that individuals who can afford insurance should be required to buy it (Sen. Kyl's hand remained down). Grassley was defending the mandate a month ago by saying, "That's individual responsibility, and even Republicans believe in individual responsibility." But you know, I kind of expect that level of about-face politics.

No, what tickles my funnybone about this political theater is that the individual mandate was sold in Massachusetts just a few years ago as "the ultimate conservative idea, which is that people have responsibility for their own care, and they don't look to government to take of them if they can afford to take care of themselves." The man pitching that argument was then-Governor, presidential aspirant, and czar of lookin' good Mitt Romney. Not only did Gov. Romney embrace the individual mandate, he made it a pre-requisite for his assent to the Massachusetts health care plan. Feast your eyes on these stirring words and tell me (in the words of another famous Romney speech, his 2008 RNC keynote) whether this idea is liberal or conservative:

No more "free riding," if you will, where an individual says: "I'm not going to pay, even though I can afford it. I'm not going to get insurance, even though I can afford it. I'm instead going to just show up and make the taxpayers pay for me."

From "ultimate conservative idea" to a "stunning assault on liberty" in just four years. Not even Mitt Romney could have predicted that flip flop.

(Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/28016916@N08/ / CC BY 2.0)