Former Vermont Governor Howard Dean, the very liberal former presidential candidate and head of the Democratic National Committee, says the individual mandatory health insurance purchase mandate is “not essential” to good health care reform and will be repealed or ruled unconstitutional. From an NBC Interview program On the Record (contained in the clip above):
Dean: The American people are not going to put up with a mandate. I have made this prediction before and I am going to make it again. By the time this thing goes into effect in 2014, I think this mandate will be gone–either through the courts or because it’s unpopular.
You don’t need it. There will be two or three percent of the people who cheat, that’s not enough to bring the system to a halt and people don’t like to be told what to do publicly…
Question: So, you expect them to drop the mandate?
Dean: Well, the courts may rule it unconstitutional.
No kidding!
Dean believes that if the mandate fails, it won’t hurt the law because it would still require insurance companies to take all comers. In other words, the approach would simply create a nationally regulated private health insurance market run through the regional exchanges.
Dean’s council makes a great deal of political sense and could dramatically help the president’s worsening poll numbers. Think about it. Removing the purchase mandate would take most of the energy out of the repeal movement by extracting the biggest thorn sticking in the national foot–while still permitting the Feds to sieze control of health care and our lives through the centralized cost control boards and other too numerous to count new bureaucracies–which is a big part of the point of Obamacare anyway.
That’s why tossing the individual purchase mandate is only part of what needs to be done, and perhaps not the most important. To really defang the beast, we have to also junk the ubiquitous new bureaucracies that exist to exert centralized control over everything that can concievably be connected to health care and cost reduction. And that will never happen unless the current political paradigm changes dramatically.
But I agree with Dean: One way or the other, the individual mandate will not stand. The real question is whether the Dems will benefit politically from the change by leading the charge under the political message, “We hear the American people,” or resist, and be flattened by the American people.
August 6th, 2010 | 6:58 pm
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Stand In The Gap, Wesley J. Smith. Wesley J. Smith said: Obamacare: Howard Dean Predicts the Individual Purchase Mandate Will Not Stand! Secondhand Smoke | A First Things Blog http://shar.es/0aBjU [...]
August 7th, 2010 | 6:21 am
[...] Health Insurance Mandate, No Problem? By nohiddenmagenta Wesley Smith has a fascinating post over at Secondhand Smoke in which he highlights ‘liberal’ health care reform champion [...]
August 7th, 2010 | 9:25 am
I think the mandate could hold, because the courts could find that anyone availing themselves of the US health system (that is, everybody) should be required to pay their share. And since hospitals are required to take any incoming patient regardless of ability to pay, that would even the scales a bit.
I see it as being roughly equivalent to requiring car owners to carry insurance. If you want to drive, you have to be financially responsible. If you want that hospital and ER to be there when you need it, you have to pay your share.
Still, even if the mandate remains, the enforcement would be sporadic to non-existent until, of course, the cheater shows up at the ER. Similar again to car insurance cheaters, who usually aren’t found out until they get in an accident. And if the person coming into the ER has no means to buy insurance, what’s the government gonna do, anyway? Throw him in the prison hospital?
So, if it would get more states on board, it wouldn’t be all that damaging to the health system to remove the mandate. We’d still have people using our health system without paying for it, but not nearly as many.
August 7th, 2010 | 9:55 am
I heard at one point that somehow Congress had failed to put in a severability clause into the bill, and that if any portion of it were to be found unconstitutional, the entire bill would be unconstitutional. I’m not certain this is true – I can hardly imagine that in their 2500 pages of law that they would have failed to do this. Apparently it’s generally the practice to put it into any law…but who knows.
Guess we’ll see.
August 7th, 2010 | 10:47 am
[...] Proposition C Nice interview with Dean on the mandate. Obamacare: Howard Dean Predicts the Individual Purchase Mandate Will Not Stand! Secondhand Smoke | A… I'm under no delusion that Dean is any different than the rest of them. He's just grandstanding [...]
August 7th, 2010 | 3:18 pm
I don’t get why he thinks only “2 to 3 percent” would cheat. States with community rating and no mandate have even more cost explosion than everywhere else. Only 2-3 people out of a hundred are going to realize there’s no reason to buy insurance when you’re healthy? I must be missing something. Or then again, maybe Howard Dean is missing something. That’s certainly in the realm of the possible.
August 9th, 2010 | 11:21 am
JoeZ: “Only 2-3 people out of a hundred are going to realize there’s no reason to buy insurance when you’re healthy?”
There isn’t?
You don’t wait to fix the roof until it’s raining, do you, Joe? Well, maybe you do. The rest of us like to have our protection in place before the emergencies happen.
Of course, if you’re going to wait until you get sick to get health insurance, you’ll owe Obama a debt of gratitude for making sure you’ll be able to get coverage despite your pre-existing condition.
August 9th, 2010 | 5:36 pm
Padraig:
Health insurance costs a lot of money. Most of the time people receive no benefit from it until they become sick. If it’s possible for them to wait until becoming sick to purchase insurance, it makes good financial sense for them to do so. If I could retroactively buy collision insurance for my car *after* a wreck, I might let my current coverage lapse and buy insurance only when I needed it.
This is why the individual mandate is a key part of the package. Without it, and with guaranteed issue and community rating, insurers might eventually find themselves covering only people who are already sick – which would put them out of business in short order.
August 10th, 2010 | 1:57 pm
I’m painfully aware of the cost of health insurance, Sparky, as well as the limits of coverage. And certainly the behavior you describe would occur, despite it being a really dumb way to try to game the system. I can just see some doof crashing his motorcycle and trying to buy insurance from the ER.
So I favor the mandate as well. But it may be a monkey wrench in health care reform, and I’d be willing to give it up if it means keeping the rest of the package.
Of course, if the Dems drop the mandate, the conservatives will jump up and say, “Well, Obamacare can’t work without the mandate! Dump it all!”
August 10th, 2010 | 10:34 pm
I *don’t* favor the mandate. I think it’s unconstitutional, and a disturbing expansion of government power. But the plan will bankrupt insurers without it.
It’s further evidence that the bill was an 11th-hour, slapped-together monster.
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