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(In »Everything is religion«)

An interesting example that sheds light on this is the bitter resistance that was mobilised against President Barack Obama’s health care reform – the Affordable Care Act – during his second term in office. It was a resistance that finally led to a ruling in the U.S. Supreme Court which, by a margin of a single vote, established that the law in question does not violate the Constitution and consequently cannot be repealed. What is interesting is the following: what the Republican resistance focused on, what they claimed with great energy was incompatible with the Constitution, was the principle of an individual mandate, that is, that the responsibility for insurance rests in the end on the individual citizen, instead of, for example, on the employer. What is particularly curious and odd in this matter is then that the idea of an individual mandate – a requirement that people protect themselves through insurance, rather like the way in which by law they must protect themselves with a safety belt when they are travelling by car – as the foundation for a health care bill was initially proposed by the Republicans themselves after having been originally launched by the conservative think-tank The Heritage Foundation in 1989.