Newt Gingrich walks back health care mandate support

Newt Gingrich walks back health care mandate support



One day after Newt Gingrich acknowledged his past support for requiring people to buy health insurance, the former House Speaker was careful to make clear that he was “completely opposed to the Obamacare mandate on individuals.”

“I am for the repeal for Obamacare, and I am against any effort to impose a federal mandate on anyone because it is fundamentally wrong and I believe unconstitutional,” he said in the short statement on YouTube, released in the wake of publicity surrounding his remarks Sunday on Meet the Press

During the Sunday interview on “Meet The Press,” Gingrich was asked if he agreed with Mitt Romney on the individual mandate.

“Well, I agree that all of us have a responsibility to pay — help pay for health care,” Gingrich responded. “And, I think that there are ways to do it that make most libertarians relatively happy. I’ve said consistently we ought to have some requirement that you either have health insurance or you post a bond.”

Host David Gregory pressed, “But that is the individual mandate, is it not?”

“It’s a variation on it,” Gingrich said.

The former congressman from Georgia has been on record for nearly two decades as supporting a requirement to purchase health insurance.

During the interview, Gregory played a 1993 clip in which Gingrich said, “I am for people, individuals — exactly like automobile insurance — individuals having health insurance and being required to have health insurance.”

During a 2006 speech to the Greater Detroit Area Health Council, the Detroit Free Press reported that he advocated that “Americans over a certain income level to buy health insurance or post a bond.”

As recent as in a 2007 op-ed in The Des Moines Register, Gingrich wrote that an "Personal responsibility extends to the purchase of health insurance. Citizens should not be able to cheat their neighbors by not buying insurance, particularly when they can afford it, and expect others to pay for their care when they need it.”

He added that an “individual mandate is an acceptable option only when the larger health care system has been fundamentally changed,” since it would be “unjust” to impose the requirement in a “broken and dysfunctional system."

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0511/55051.html#ixzz1MYbHWNDf

 

So 2 of the top 2012 GOP candidates(Mitt /Newt) were for the mandate before they were against it

Millions of hypocrite republicans who were screaming at town hall meetings during the Obamacare circus will be voting for Mitt and Newt in the GOP primaries

 

The ironic thing is the mandate as well as most of Obamacare are Republican/Conservative Think Tank ideas.

Check out the Republican bills submitted in response to Hillarycare compared to S2009 aka Obamacare:

http://www.kaiserhealthnews.org/Graphics/2010/022310-Bill-comparison.aspx

Here's what that bastion of liberalism The Heritage Foundation had to say about 20 years ago:
"
The second central element-in the Heritage proposal is a two-way commitment between government and citizen. Under this social contract, the federal government would agree to make it financially possible, through refund able tax benefits or in some cases by providing access to public-sector health programs, for every American family to purchase at least a basic package of 3 Butler and Haislmaier, op. cit 6 medic a l care, including catastrophic insurance. In return, government would require, by law every head of household to acquire at least a basic health plan for his or her family.Thus there would be mandated coverage under the Heritage proposal
"

Sure sounds like a mandate to me.

Seneca

 

Big govt republicans are socialists too...

If they taxed people less we could afford healthcare.
If bush and the neo con job sociialists did not agree to pay high prices for old peoples drugs with tax dollars... the price would come down.

If we could buy they from Canada or Mex they would come down.
If we allowed insurance companies to allow national plans and had the all competing prices would come down.

If we were not encouraging foreigners to come here for our welfare benefits... our costs would go down.

big govt is the problem.

 

Noone comes closer to possibly being the anti Christ.