Health Care Reform: the Individual Mandate

Individual Mandate Group Project

Attempts at implementing a health insurance mandate for US citizens began in the late 1980’s. The idea for an individual mandate was first proposed in 1989 in a brief for the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research group and think-tank. The brief, written by Stuart Butler, was “seen then as a conservative alternative to some of the health care approaches favored by liberals” (Cooper). Democrats favored a single-payer system and an employer mandate, as seen in the 1993 health-care reform bill proposed by President Bill Clinton. The individual mandate made its first legislative appearance in the 1993 Health Equity and Access Reform Today Act, supported by conservatives and backed by Republican Senator John Chafee (Klein). Republicans believed that an individual mandate was much less risky than the health care overhaul created by the Clinton administration (Cooper). The 1993 Clinton health plan failed, due to staunch opposition from conservatives and the health insurance industry, and it took many years for another attempt at health care reform.

A bipartisan approach for an individual mandate began in 2004 by Democratic Senator Ron Wyden and was proposed in the 2007 Healthy Americans Act. This bill was eventually co-sponsored by nine Democrats and eleven Republicans however did not gain enough support to pass (Klein). In 2008, Senator Barack Obama was opposed to the idea of an individual mandate. He stated “I was opposed to this idea because my general attitude was the reason people don’t have health insurance is not because they don’t want it. It’s because they can’t afford it” (Klein). After gaining office, President Obama changed his views and included an individual mandate in his health care reform act, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA). Republicans now became the main opponents of an individual mandate, with every Senate Republican voting the mandate “unconstitutional” in a 2009 vote on the bill....