An individual mandate is a requirement by a government that certain individual citizens purchase or otherwise obtain a good or service. In the case of Obamacare aka Affordable Care Act, the individual mandate would force citizens to purchase health insurance and they would be penalized monetarily if they do not comply.The Supreme Court has recently agreed to hear arguments against the constitutionality of the individual mandate, among other issues regarding Obamacare, in March 2012, with a ruling expected by June or early July.
It is also known that Jonathan Gruber, a healthcare economist and MIT professor helped Mitt Romney fashion Romneycare in Massachusetts and then went on to advise Barack Obama on creating Obamacare. Gruber has gone on to say recently that they are the same thing.
Howard Dean and Paul Krugman, among others have maintained that Obamacare and Romneycare are the same, or identical and PolitiFact has rated both those assertions as "mostly true."
The individual mandate portion of the mammoth Obamacare bill has been the least popular and two years after the Democrats which then controlled the House and controlled the Senate passed the bill with Barack Obama signing Obamacare into law, Americans according to Gallup, Democrats (56%), Republicans (94%) and Independents (70%) still believe the individual mandate is unconstitutional.
The headline today from BuzzFeed is "Mitt Romney's Advice For ObamaCare: Look At RomneyCare," which points to an op-ed article Mitt Romney wrote which appeared in appeared in USA Today on 07/30/2009, where Romney himself, encouraged Barack Obama to implement the most egregious portion of Obamacare... the individual mandate.
Specifically the portion quoted below of Romney's op-ed which was an open statement to Obama as evidenced by the headline of the piece itself which was "Mr. President, What’s the Rush?:
Our experience also demonstrates that getting every citizen insured doesn’t have to break the bank. First, we established incentives for those who were uninsured to buy insurance. Using tax penalties, as we did, or tax credits, as others have proposed, encourages “free riders” to take responsibility for themselves rather than pass their medical costs on to others.
Mitt Romney encouraged Barack Obama, via his own words in that op-ed, to force the highly unpopular, individual mandate down the throats of Americans that were opposed at the time of passage and are still convinced the mandate is unconstitutional.
With the Supreme Court hearing arguments this month and rendering a ruling just a few short months before the November presidential election, Obamacare is expected to be an issue focused on leading to election day.
One candidate holds absolutely no credibility when he claims he would repeal Obamacare and is opposed to the individual mandate..... Mitt Romney.
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