Back to index

1:37

(In »Everything is religion«)

Consequently, the individual mandate was the basis of the system that Obama’s rival Mitt Romney implemented as Governor of Massachusetts, and also of the Republican alternative to the bill that Bill Clinton once failed to steer through Congress, and which was built on the principle of employer responsibility (which Clinton in hindsight regards as a decisive mistake). All the chopping and changing in the Republican establishment’s dramatic turnaround from love to hate in terms of an individual mandate are depicted in an extremely illuminating essay by the journalist and blogger Ezra Klein in The New Yorker magazine (June 25, 2012). Barack Obama had no intention of repeating Bill Clinton’s mistake by proposing a law that his political opponents detested on the grounds of principle. Therefore, he based his health care act on an idea that the Republicans themselves had introduced once upon a time and had repeatedly expressed their support for: the individual mandate. Obama himself was one of the last Democrats to concur with this Republican idea. So what happens? Lo and behold, in a vote in December 2009 all Republican senators voted against the law and in favour of declaring it unconstitutional precisely because of the construct based on an individual mandate that they themselves had championed for 20 years.