heritage foundation releases republican endorsed health care plan

when will right wing followers ever learn? for a year now they have been up in arms over the mandate and since the supreme court upheld the mandate some have threatened harm to the judges who upheld the mandate.
so now a republican endorsed plan has come out by the heritage foundation. the Heritage Foundation is an American conservative think tank based in Washington, D.C. Heritage's stated mission is to "formulate and promote conservative ideas".
so what do we find on page 8 item two?


"mandate all households to obtain adequate insurance:
many states now require passengers to wear seat belts. many others require liability insurance. but neither the federal government nor any state requires households to protect themselves from catastrophic costs of serious accident or illness. under the heritage plan there would be such a requirement".


http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2012/07/assuring-affordable-health-care-for-all-americans/

 

ROFL

 

LOL !!!

 

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/9ye_UQOIU-k" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

 

This thread is a thing of beauty.

 

So what?

 

I think republicans got their message mixed up on the mandate. The problem with the mandate was that it was unconstitutional, not that it was a bad idea. You can't require issues like no preexisting conditions exclusions, etc without some form of mandate. That was the crucial distinction with Romneycare. It was one state, so the constitutional limitation of interstate commerce didn't apply.

Obamacare as a whole is a terrible plan, mandate or not. Top-down, government-designed health care belongs in places like cuba and the old USSR. Of course, liberals are still wedded to discredited ideas from their glory years in the 1930's, so they missed the lessons fo the late 20th century that socialism doesn't work too well.

 

I can't think of a better way to reform the health insurance problem then to double to the size and authority of the IRS.

 

I disagree dude, they could have made it illegal for hc insurance providers to avoid coverage of people with preexisting conditions, their premiums would be higher, but they could still get coverage, and choices between providers.

Or they could have tried to provide a legal framework for some type of private, national risk pool, where the providers could collude on a price that they could offer for what essentially would be one giant group plan. Individuals with preexisting conditions, or huge premiums, anyone who would pay more with a standard plan, could buy into the high risk pool. the insurance companies could share in the payouts and profits proportionally by the amount of individuals they cover.

 

http://www.forbes.com/sites/aroy/20...nservative-history-of-the-individual-mandate/

...........Last October, prompted by a Wall Street Journal piece by James Taranto, I recounted how the Heritage Foundation was once the leading conservative advocate of the individual mandate. In response to various articles of this stripe, Stuart has published an op-ed in USA Today, in which he describes as a “myth” the idea that Heritage invented the mandate. “I headed Heritage’s health work for 30 years,” he writes. “And make no mistake: Heritage and I actively oppose the individual mandate, including in an amicus brief filed in the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals to the Supreme Court.” He notes that his proposal struck a contrast with Hillarycare, and that Milton Friedman also called for an individual mandate:

The confusion arises from the fact that 20 years ago, I held the view that as a technical matter, some form of requirement to purchase insurance was needed in a near-universal insurance market to avoid massive instability through “adverse selection” (insurers avoiding bad risks and healthy people declining coverage). At that time, President Clinton was proposing a universal health care plan, and Heritage and I devised a viable alternative.

My view was shared at the time by many conservative experts, including American Enterprise Institute (AEI) scholars, as well as most non-conservative analysts. Even libertarian-conservative icon Milton Friedman, in a 1991 Wall Street Journal article, advocated replacing Medicare and Medicaid “with a requirement that every U.S. family unit have a major medical insurance policy.”

My idea was hardly new. Heritage did not invent the individual mandate.

Stuart says that Heritage’s version of the individual mandate contained “three critical features” that distinguish it from Obamacare’s mandate: (1) it required people to buy catastrophic coverage, rather than more expensive comprehensive coverage; (2) it was primarily financed “through the carrot of a generous health credit or voucher…rather than by a stick”; (3) Heritage’s mandate “was actually the loss of certain tax breaks…not a legal requirement.”

In fairness to Heritage’s critics, it’s worth pointing out that: (1) Heritage proposed the individual mandate in 1989, well before Bill and Hillary Clinton were on anyone’s political radar screen; (2) Obamacare and Romneycare both finance individual insurance purchases through generous vouchers (via the exchanges); (3) Obamacare’s mandate is “enforced,” weakly, by withholding tax refunds.

Why has Heritage changed its mind?

Stuart goes on to give four reasons why he and Heritage no longer support the mandate: (1) a mandate isn’t necessary because “the new field of behavioral economics taught me that default auto-enrollment in employer or nonemployer insurance plans can lead many people to buy coverage without a requirement;” (2) “advances in ‘risk-adjustment’ tools are improving the stability of voluntary insurance,” as illustrated by the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program; (3) Obamacare’s mandate forces people to buy comprehensive coverage rather than catastrophic coverage; (4) Obamacare’s mandate is unconstitutional.

Stuart, of course, is perfectly entitled to change his mind, and the reasons he gives for having done so are ones I’d agree with. (I would also point out, as I do repeatedly in this space, that the “free rider” problem is grossly exaggerated, and that an individual mandate actually increases free-riding.)

Many conservatives opposed the individual mandate

The fact that many prominent Republicans and conservatives supported the mandate does not, by any stretch, mean that conservatives did as a whole. Peter Ferrara, a Heritage Foundation alumnus, takes credit for “killing” the Heritage plan after he left the think-tank.

Ferrara correctly points out that a key flaw with the individual mandate is that the government is then required to define what types of insurance qualify for the mandate, and government will always be tempted to require costly, comprehensive insurance:

I had been close friends up until then with Stuart Butler, even double dating a couple of times with our girlfriends and then wives. Before he became Director of Domestic Policy [at the Heritage Foundation], Heritage had offered the job to then another friend of mine, Tony Pellechio. But I wanted Stuart to get it, because I thought Stuart was more hard core. So I talked Tony out of taking the job when he came to me to ask what I thought he should do. Sure enough, Stuart was next in line. Stuart does not know about this history almost 30 years ago to this day.

Stuart had no response to my objections to the individual mandate. But he was passionately devoted to the brilliance of the Heritage health plan. I told him it was so close to the Hillary plan, and so poorly framed as an alternative, that I predicted that President Clinton would come to point to it as the GOP alternative plan, and seek to get the Hillary plan passed as a compromise just ironing out the differences (employer pays or worker pays, generous health insurance or cheap health insurance).

Sure enough, a year later, as the Hillary plan was about to go down to defeat, President Clinton arose to point to the Heritage plan as the true GOP alternative, and offer to pass health reform by just ironing out the differences. Fortunately by then, I had already killed the Heritage health plan.

Well, I guess I won’t be going to Peter for job advice, but his policy critique of the individual mandate was correct then, and is correct now. And Stuart agrees with it.

In 1994 Sen. Don Nickles (R., Okla.) and Rep. Cliff Stearns (R., Fla.) turned the Heritage plan into a bill. Peter Ferrara and others, such as Tom Miller at the Cato Institute, rallied other conservatives against the plan. “By endorsing the concept of compulsory universal insurance coverage,” wrote Miller, “Nickles-Stearns undermines the traditional principles of personal liberty and individual responsibility that provide essential bulwarks against all-intrusive governmental control of health care.”

Ferrara convinced 37 leaders of the conservative movement, including Phyllis Schlafly, Grover Norquist, and Paul Weyrich, to sign a petition opposing the bill. “To this day,” Peter writes, “my relationship with Stuart Butler and Heritage has never recovered.”...................