Mike Hudack

The Mandate

mikehudack:

That’s astonishingly unfair. I’m not a fan of the mandate either (I’m not a fan of guaranteed issue, for that matter) but we need to acknowledge where this comes from. “The Democrats” (as if they’re a Borg Collective) generally supported an individual mandate as a compromise short of single payer. During the Presidential campaign Obama was the only one not to support a mandate. This is him compromising to match the will of the rest of his party, nothing else.

I’m not buying this. When Obama campaigned against Clinton, the issue of the mandate was the single biggest policy difference between them. He campaigned as if this difference mattered. He campaigned as if this were an issue of principle. For him to jettison this in his first year in office is atrocious. This isn’t a compromise he needed to make with the rest of his party—it’s a compromise he chose to make with the insurance companies that donated lots of money to his party.

The debate over health care has been raging for decades. This imposed mandate is something relatively new and absolutely awful. It’s also, most likely, unconstitutional. But we shouldn’t have to resort to the courts to protect our rights … we should be able to turn to our leaders. Obama failed us in this regard.

You’re right. Obama’s stance against the mandate — or, rather, his championing of a plan that didn’t include a mandate — was a bit part of the campaign.

If Obama had insisted on a plan that didn’t include a mandate we would not have gotten health care reform. He would have been unable to collect sufficient Democratic votes to overcome Republican intransigence. He probably would have collected a few extra Republican votes, but not nearly enough to compensate for the lack of Democrats.

Part of the reason we elected him — or, at least, a major reason why I voted for him — is because he’s flexible. He’s a pragmatist. Once he got into the White House and began his legislative program he realized that his original stance on the campaign trail was unrealistic. And so he pivoted.

I respect his pivot in the same way that I respect Bloomberg’s decision at a signing ceremony not to sign a bill regulating pedicabs because people at the signing ceremony made convincing arguments against the bill.

Washington is, necessarily, a messy place. Dogmatic adherence to black-and-white policy prescriptions and philosophies does not work. Washington requires an overarching and moderately consistent governing philosophy that’s sufficiently flexible to allow change, elasticity and compromise while guiding the compromise to still be largely consistent with the original goal.

I would prefer a health care bill that doesn’t have a mandate and doesn’t include a guaranteed issue provision (meaningfully, it strikes me that you can’t have one without the other). Still, I’m happy that legislation is moving forward. The health care system in this country is so broken — the cost curve so warped — that any progress, no matter how flawed, is still important.