Back in 1993, Clinton Democrats proposed a health-care reform bill. Republican Senators Chuck Grassley (Iowa) and Orrin Hatch (Utah) made a counteroffer, a competing bill -- which called for an individal mandate. (The individual mandate makes it compulsory that everyone buy health insurance; that throws a bunch of young, healthy people into the pool to help pay for those who are more at risk -- the elderly, infants, people with chronic health problems.)
Today, with the Tea Party screaming that the individual mandate is unconstitutional and an invasion of the individual's personal liberty, they think differently.
Here's Rachel Maddow on the subject:
Grassley: "If it was unconstitutional today, it was unconstitutional in 1993, but I don't think anybody gave it much thought" back then.
Hatch: "Back on Hillary-care they had a mandate in there. I didn't realize it, I didn't pay attention to it. [No, no, Senator. I don't know whether "Hillary-care" had a mandate or not, but we're not talking about the Democrats' plan; we're talking about the one that you and Grassley proposed. "I didn't realize it, I didn't pay attention to it"? Senator, you wrote the proposal.] We were trying to defeat Hillary-care. The more I studied since then, the more I've looked at it, the more I've come to the conclusion it would be unconstitutional to force people to buy something they don't want to buy."
Oh, by the way, Britt Hume on Fox News said that if only the Democrats had included some Republican ideas in the health-care bill, it wouldn't have been so adamantly opposed. He's lying. In the first place, the Republican strategy was to stonewall the bill completely, rather than negotiate to try to improve it; even so, more than a few Republican suggestions were in fact included in the bill. I bring this up because in the same interview quoted above, Grassley said it was a bad bill "even though it's got a lot of good things," even "a lot of things that I wrote."
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