The irony.........the ACA is nearly a carbon copy of the health care bill proposed by Rs in 1993.
After his inauguration, Obama announced to a joint session of Congress in February 2009 his intent to work with Congress to construct a plan for health care reform. [54] [55] By July, a series of bills were approved by committees within the House of Representatives. [56] On the Senate side, from June through to September, the Senate Finance Committee held a series of 31 meetings to develop of a health care reform bill. This group - in particular, Senators Max Baucus (D-MT), Chuck Grassley (R-IA), Kent Conrad (D-ND), Olympia Snowe (R-ME), Jeff Bingaman (D-NM), and Mike Enzi (R-WY) - met for more than 60 hours, and the principles that they discussed, in conjunction with the other Committees, became the foundation of the Senate's health care reform bill. [57] The meetings were held in public and broadcast by C-SPAN and can be seen on the C-SPAN web site [58] or at the Committee's own web site. [59]
With universal health care as one of the stated goals of the Obama Administration, Congressional Democrats and health policy experts like Jonathan Gruber and David Cutler argued that guaranteed issue would require both a community rating and an individual mandate to prevent either adverse selection and/or free riding from creating an insurance death spiral; [60] they convinced Obama that this was necessary, persuading him to accept Congressional proposals that included a mandate. [61] This approach was preferred because the President and Congressional leaders concluded that more liberal plans, such as Medicare-for-all, could not win filibuster-proof support in the Senate. By deliberately drawing on bipartisan ideas - the same basic outline was supported by former Senate Majority Leaders Howard Baker (R-TN), Bob Dole (R-KS), Tom Daschle (D-SD) and George Mitchell (D-ME) - the bill's drafters hoped to increase the chances of getting the necessary votes for passage. [62] [63]
However, following the adoption of an individual mandate as a central component of the proposed reforms by Democrats, Republicans began to oppose the mandate and threaten to filibuster any bills that contained it. [36] Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who lead the Republican Congressional strategy in responding to the bill, calculated that Republicans should not support the bill, and worked to keep party discipline and prevent defections: [64]
| “ | It was absolutely critical that everybody be together because if the proponents of the bill were able to say it was bipartisan, it tended to convey to the public that this is O.K., they must have figured it out. [65] | ” | Republican Senators, including those who had supported previous bills with a similar mandate, began to describe the mandate as "unconstitutional". Writing in The New Yorker, Ezra Klein stated that "the end result was... a policy that once enjoyed broad support within the Republican Party suddenly faced unified opposition." [39] The New York Times subsequently noted: "It can be difficult to remember now, given the ferocity with which many Republicans assail it as an attack on freedom, but the provision in President Obama's health care law requiring all Americans to buy health insurance has its roots in conservative thinking." [38] [45]
en.wikipedia.org
|
