Obamacare’s Mandate: Worst. Policy. EVER!
So perhaps the title is a slight exaggeration, but nevertheless a recent article by Paul Starr justifies the reference to the catchphrase made popular by Jeff Albertson. As background, Starr is a prominent liberal who worked in the Clinton White House on the ill-fated Hillarycare proposal (so he knows unpopular and ill-fated policy whereof he speaks).
Starr notes Obamacare’s mandate is 1) politically unpopular, 2) likely to be so weak as to invite non-compliance, and 3) placing the entire statute in danger of being struck down by the Supreme Court. He calls the mandate “a political as well as a legal miscalculation,” one that “put at unnecessary risk [Democrats’] most significant domestic achievement of the past three years.” Starr adds that “No other provision could have provided as effective a basis for both the legal challenges to the law and the political campaigns against it.…Public opinion [has been] focused on the least popular aspect of [Obamacare], dragging down overall support and maintaining the high-intensity opposition to the law on the right.” His ultimate conclusion:
Democrats managed to get themselves the worst possible result: a law that enflames the opposition on the basis of overreaching federal power but may not work in practice because there is no real power behind it. Whether or not the Court strikes it down, the individual mandate has been one of the most serious political and policy mistakes of recent decades.
Two years ago, former Speaker Pelosi famously said we had to pass the bill to find out what’s in it. This latest article highlights how even liberals are finding out what’s in the bill, and discovering that they don’t like it either.