Ann Coulter has now written an unqualified
defense of Romneycare. What she doesn’t appear to realize is
how useful her column will be to defenders of Obamacare.
She writes, “It’s not as if we had a beautifully functioning
free market in health care until Gov. Mitt Romney came along and
wrecked it by requiring that Massachusetts residents purchase their
own health insurance.” Coulter points out that many conservatives
and libertarians believed “mandatory private health insurance was
considered the free-market alternative to the Democrats’ piecemeal
socialization of the entire medical industry.” She argues that the
Heritage Foundation and the Manhattan Institute were conservative
think tanks that backed Romneycare.
Every single on one of these arguments could be used for
Obamacare. Obamacare is mandatory private health insurance
purchased through exchanges with subsidies and expanded Medicaid
thrown in. That is also the basic architecture of Romneycare. Obama
will argue that his plan wasn’t a government takeover of health
care because it’s “not as if we had a beautifully functioning free
market in health care until President Barack Obama came along and
wrecked it.” He can also point out that many libertarians and
conservatives were desperate enough to support his approach when
the Democrats were touting policies to its left.
Coulter goes on to say that Romneycare passed by overwhelming
majorities in both houses of the state legislature, including Scott
Brown’s vote. But Brown was only one of a handful of Republicans in
the legislature. Those overwhelming majorities were overwhelmingly
Democratic. And when you look at the
promiment photo of the Romneycare signing ceremony, you will
see not the leaders of the Heritage Foundation and the Manhattan
Institute beaming with Romney but the Democratic leaders of the
state legislature and Teddy Kennedy. Continually dropping Bob
Moffit’s name doesn’t alter this reality.
Finally, Coulter defends the individual mandate on policy
grounds. It’s no worse than other examples of government coercion,
she says. The Constitution doesn’t create an unalienable right not
to buy health insurance, she argues. The individual mandate is
necessary to deal with the free rider problem created in part “the
1946 federal law essentially requiring hospitals to provide free
medical services to all comers.” Coulter writes, “The
hyperventilating over government-mandated health insurance confuses
a legal argument with a policy objection,” even suggesting, messy
constitutional issues aside, Obamacare wouldn’t be as big of a deal
if all it did was require people to buy health insurance.
Leave aside the facts that many of us do oppose the
individual mandate on policy grounds as well as legal ones, and
that the federal law she blames for the free rider problem passed
in 1986, not 1946. Every one of these arguments can and will be
used to defend Obamacare. And virtually every one of them is wrong,
as concerns both Obamacare and Romneycare.
The individual mandate is less about the free rider problem than
making the ban on pre-existing conditions sustainable by forcing
healthier individuals into the insurance market. The costs of
expanding coverage in this fashion have
far exceeded the costs of free riders. None of Coulter’s
examples of government coercion involve forcing two private
entities into a contract with one another. The Constitution doesn’t
enumerate the rights of the people, but the powers of the federal
government.
Coulter’s entire argument hinges on Romneycare being
constitutional and Obamacare being unconstitutional. I’ll let pass
for a moment the problems with her apparent endorsement of
untrammeled state government power and acknowledge, as I have
before, that states have police powers that the Constitution
doesn’t grant to the federal government. Obamacare raises a
constitutional issue that Romneycare doesn’t.
The number of people who will find this distinction compelling
in a general election is vanishingly small. Worse, the swing vote
on the Supreme Court doesn’t evaluate the constitutionality of laws
based on the ratifying public’s original understanding of the
Constitution (though the court should). A critical mass of justices
will look to see whether the president and Congress were acting on
a mainstream view of acceptable government power. Coulter has given
them a list of examples to bolster this view. Defending Romneycare
undermines the arguments against Obamacare by making them looking
like partisan point-scoring.
