The individual mandate of the health care reform act (PPACA – Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act) is now under attack in the courts and on Capitol Hill by Republicans, libertarians, and Tea Party enthusiasts who call it an affront to personal liberty.
The industry, however, views it as the bedrock supporting the entire health reform law and is lobbying to keep it (the prospect of a vastly bigger market has helped spark a 7.4 percent rise since Jan. 1 in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Managed Health Care Index of publicly traded health-care companies). Follow the debate in this Businessweek article.
It seems to me that this is the usual bad faith on the part of the Tea Party [sic]. The whole point of the HCR was to provide for an orderly payment of claims, so that everyone is financially responsible for medical attention received.
It seems to validate Frum’s thesis that the GOP is essentially the political wing of New Corp, since the mandate would ordinarily be in and of itself a concession to the GOP constituency: no one pays for anyone else’s HCI unless it’s absolutely inevitable.
(The logic is that, if the GOP were a conventional interest-based party then it would be open to transactions with the White House. Since it is closed to transactions categorically, it is essentially acting to preserve its monopoly as rather than advance the interests of its supporters).