DOMESTIC
leads to wastage, exploitation by hospitals and insurance companies driven
by profit, and several other causes.
Therefore, if the individual mandate broadens the risk pool and focuses health care companies not just on
profits but on providing result-based
effective cures for diseases as well
as preventive screening mechanisms,
the prize for the country could be as
much as a trillion dollars of reduced
medical costs. Conservatively, the
CBO estimates that the federal deficit
is projected to reduce by $100 billion
in 10 years by bending the cost curve
through a combination of policy and if
that is the case, why are 40% of Americans opposed to Obamacare and 14
percent indifferent to it? Clearly, it has
become a lightning rod that divides our
society. Ninety-one percent of blacks
are in favor, but 70 percent of whites
are against this regulation. Sixty percent of Democrats are in favor, but 80
percent of Republicans and 70 percent
of independents are against. Are the
reasons for such a wide polarization of
12
VANDERBILT POLITICAL REVIEW
views really valid? Republicans feel
Obamacare is socialized medicine and
reflects the fact that ‘President Obama
is very nearly a practising Bolshevik.’
They dislike the encroachment of the
federal government into the arena of
private health care. They detest the
fact IRS is involved in collecting penalties and taxing small businesses –
“you must buy health care or pay the
Gestapo: the IRS.” Republicans have
also drummed it into the heads of their
constituents that the individual mandate is unconstitutional. But this is a
strange twist of political skullduggery.
Republicans first proposed the concept of the individual mandate as far
back as 1989. In 1993, Senator John
Chafee proposed a similar regulation
that present-day Republican senators
like Orrin Hatch and Chuck Grassley
endorsed. In an ironic twist, President
Obama was initially against the individual mandate but Hillary Clinton
was for it, and so was Mitt Romney
who passed an exactly similar bill in
Massachusetts in 2006. MIT Profes-
sor Jonathan Gruber, who advised Mitt
Romney in 2006, was the leading light
of the Obamacare legislation. As Senator Dick Durban mentioned on the Senate floor, “Mitt Romney was the baby
daddy of the Obama