Health Care BS

President Oblarney’s blitz of the Sunday talk shows produced one interesting moment: his denial that a federal law requiring everyone to buy health insurance (or pay a fine) would be, in effect, a tax increase.

For us to say that you’ve got to take a responsibility to get health insurance is absolutely not a tax increase. What it’s saying is, is that we’re not going to have other people carrying your burdens for you anymore.

This is obviously BS. Of course an individual mandate is a tax. Moreover, the president’s comparison of a health insurance mandate to state laws about auto insurance is also nonsense:

We’re not going to have other people carrying your burdens for you any more than the fact that right now everybody in America, just about, has to get auto insurance. Nobody considers that a tax increase.

This analogy fails for 3 reasons: There’s no universal auto insurance mandate, the auto coverage market is free of government-created distortions, and auto insurance is connected to a personal choice to drive.

But the most important feature of Obama’s defense of the individual insurance mandate is that it is a brazen reversal of the strong position against mandates he took during the presidential campaign.

During the primary campaign, Obama routinely attacked Hillary because she favored an individual mandate. Ironically, he was denounced by people like Paul Krugman for doing so:

I recently castigated Mr. Obama for adopting right-wing talking points about a Social Security “crisis.” Now he’s echoing right-wing talking points on health care.

Well, Obama has apparently seen the light. Having run for president claiming he was against insurance mandates, he is now ready to sign a health care reform bill containing one.

That’s certainly a “change we can believe in.”

UPDATE:

In addition to reiterating that Obama has done a pirouette on the mandate question, Philip Klein points out that the president’s preposterous tax claim is refuted by the Baucus bill itself:

On page 29, the Baucus proposal reads, ‘The consequence for not maintaining insurance would be an excise tax….The excise tax would be assessed through the tax code and applied as an additional amount of Federal tax owed.’

If it quacks like a tax …