Feb 1st, 2011
Ezra Klein interviews Mark Pauly, life long Republican, who first conceived the HCR "mandate" in conjunction with the hyper-conservative Heritage Foundation at the request of the G.H.W. Bush administration.
It is largely this proposal that is written into the law today. How the heck anyone can describe backers of the provision as "socialist" continues to astound me. The money quotes:
"Was the constitutionality of the provision a question, either in your deliberations or after it was released?
I don’t remember that being raised at all. The way it was viewed by the Congressional Budget Office in 1994 was, effectively, as a tax. You either paid the tax and got insurance that way or went and got it another way. So I've been surprised at that argument. But I’m not an expert on the Constitution. My fix would be to simply say raise everyone’s taxes by what a health insurance policy would cost -- Congress definitely has the power to do that -- and then tell people that if they obtain insurance, they'll get a tax break of the same amount. So instead of a penalty, it’s a perfectly legal tax break. But this seems to me to angelic pinhead density arguments about whether it’s a payment to do something or not to do something."
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