"Individual mandate" was not always a dirty word

Reviewing the history of health care policy in the U. S. brings startling revelations in this day of demonizing anything-Obama as socialism, government control, and ergo bad, bad, bad.

Republican Theodore Roosevelt first proposed national health insurance in 1912 when running to regain the presidency.  He lost.

In 1932 a group of doctors, economists, and hospital administrators spent five years studying the problem of health care costs.   They issued a report saying that health care should be available to all.

In 1935 FDR wanted to create a national health insurance but decided to tackle Social Security first.    He was never able to get the health care initiative passed.

Because of the 1942 war time, emergency wage and price controls instituted by FDR, businesses were not able to compete for workers by offering higher pay.  Instead they offered health insurance as an inducement.   Thus began the employer-provided health insurance.

Truman tried to get a national health insurance program through Congress in the post-WWII period.  The AMA attacked it as "socialized medicine" and it failed to pass.

Medicare and Medicaid were signed into law by Lyndon Johnson in 1965.

In 1974, Nixon proposed a plan to cover all Americans through private insurance -- provided by employers or assisted by government subsidies for those would could not afford it.   Watergate pushed this plan aside.

Jimmy Carter in 1976 pushed for mandatory national health insurance as a presidential candidate, but the bad economy prevented any action on it after he became president.

Ronald Reagen signed the 1986 COBRA plan that guaranteed 18 months of continued coverage to workers who leave their jobs.

The conservative think tank Heritage Foundation originated the idea of the individual mandate in 1989.   In 1993 two different bills were introduced by prominent Republicans that contained an individual health insurance mandate.  Some of the Republican senators who sponsored those bills now oppose the individual mandate in ObamaCare.

In 1993 President Clinton put Hillary Clinton in charge of studying and proposing health care reform.  It met strong Republican opposition and divided Democrats who were under strong pressure from business and the health care insurance lobbyists.

In 2007 a bipartisan group introduced a bill that included an individual mandate.  It got nowhere

Obama and Congress spent an intense year ironing out compromises that culminated in the historic passage in 2010 of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which is now under such fierce demands for repeal by Republicans -- and even a Supreme Court hearing on the constitutionality of the individual mandate, with arguments before the court to begin today.

Indisputably, national health care coverage, and specifically the individual mandate, have had bipartisan support in the past.   What a shame that something so important has become a political wrangle and the subject of demonization by the demagogues

Ralph