Individual Mandate

If you were paying attention to your health care headlines recently, you might have doubled back for a second look at this caption: "Gingrich suggests insurance mandate for some." Huh? Is Newt Gingrich thinking seriously about a requirement to purchase health insurance? Is that a typo? No.

Let's recap. At an Alegent Health event in Omaha, the former Speaker of the House suggested that a strategy to combat high health care costs should include a requirement that people who earn more than $75,000 a year purchase insurance. According to an AP story, Gingrich said it was, " ‘fundamentally immoral' for a person who can afford insurance to save money by going without, then show up at an emergency room and demand free care."

This is in keeping with some Gingrich's past comments about individual responsibility in the context of health reform. In a June 2007 opinion piece in the Des Moines Register, he said:

DEPARTMENT OF MOON HOWLING: The Las Vegas Review & Journal takes a long look at one of the country's more important signature firms, National Voter Outreach and its CEO Rick Arnold. I've interviewed Arnold in his Carson City home, and found him to be one of the more thoughtful people in the petition trade, critical of its problems and clear-eyed about its limitations. This story is built heavily around criticism from the liberal/progressive Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, which is quick to lable signature gathering as corrupt (at least in cases where it opposes the cause in question). There is a "shocked, shocked" quality to this criticism. The signature gathering business has plenty of problem workers, many of them poorly trained folks who, for lifestyle reasons, have taken a job that usually pays them in cash. But BISC and other critics invariably propopse to criminalize the process of gathering signatures, as in Oklahoma. In supporting these restrictions, liberals are hurting themselves, by establishing precedents restricting political speech that can be used by their political opponents. And such restrictions don't stop direct democracy. They merely slow it down, adding to the costs (and thus the influence of interest groups) that progressives love to denounce. The more you regulate, the more firms like National Voter Outreach will benefit.