Hey, didn’t President Obama say that his health care plan isn’t much different than what the Heritage Foundation once advocated? He said that, and there’s a little truth to the charge, but (surprise!), that’s not the whole story.
A terrific post on The Corner from Stephen Spruiell asks how Mitt Romney was blindsided on health care reform. But it makes a much larger statement about the ways the free-marketeers have progressively (heh) won the debate on the Right and, in the process, made their health care arguments more palatable to the general public.
The long and short of it: In 1993-4, when it seemed HillaryCare was inevitable, the mainstream conservative position for health care reform, largely championed by the Heritage Foundation, included an individual mandate while preserving private insurance companies. Why? As Spruiell explains, the momentum for some type of tectonic change in health care provision seemed unstoppable. If something was going to pass, the logic went, better to advocate a not-quite-federal takeover of health care in contrast to a total federal takeover of health care.
A handful of free-market/libertarian types urged people to not panic, and started devising the reforms that would, over time, constitute consumer-driven health care, including Medical Savings Accounts. Phil Gramm, and to a lesser extent Dick Cheney, were the heroes here.
When HillaryCare folded, the free marketeers got to work. And over time, they won over the vast majority of conservatives who had backed the individual mandate, guaranteed issue, and community rating during the mid-90s debate. Now Heritage has said its initial support of those regulations ? always more modest than Obama’s proposal, the foundation insists ? was mistaken. So has Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch, who authored legislation based on the original Heritage plan. Spruiell writes
What happened in the intervening period is that the political center of gravity shifted to the right on this issue. Republicans looked to the
town halls, the tea parties, and the polling on Obamacare and concluded that they could safely oppose the entire concept of compulsory insurance coverage and offer a different
direction on health care … . Compulsory insurance would not be necessary, after all, if insurance were something
most people could afford to buy on their own.
The bulk of the article suggests how Romney might extricate himself from the program he championed in Massachusetts. Since I make no claim to be a miracle worker, I’ll remain silent on that point.
[Bonus observation: The post also references an article for NR that our own fearless leader wrote during the HillaryCare debate.]
