Gingrich on National Health Care

John McCormack of the Weekly Standard picked up on an interesting story on what Newt Gingrich had to say all the way back in 2009 regarding national health care mandates.  Gingrich has maintained that while he was supportive of the individual mandate in the 90's (as was the Heritage Foundation and other conservative think-tanks), he later abandoned that view.  But here is Gingrich in 2009:

"It is encouraging and it will be fascinating to watch now as that moves into a more detailed negotiation," he said.

Gingrich added that "we believe that there should be must carry – that is, everybody should either have health insurance or if you’re an absolute libertarian, we would allow you to post a bond, but we would not allow people to be free riders failing to insure themselves and then showing up at the emergency room with no means of payment. If you have must-carry, then the insurance companies have told us that we can have must-issue, and then you don't have to worry about cherry-picking and maneuvering."

"As we move beyond today's press conference at the White House, this is the kind of general model that we're going to be advocating."

Here is the blog Verum Serum on the context of these statements at that time:

Well, here you have it: not only has Gingrich been a long-standing proponent of a federal health insurance mandate, he clearly and unequivocally called for it as part of the White House health reform initiative in May 2009. Mission accomplished then.

There is something else worth noting in this clip. Not only did Gingrich make the “conservative” argument for the mandate in dealing with the free rider problem, he also advanced a favorite argument of the left. Which is that the only way insurers could be required to offer coverage to everyone regardless of their health status (“must issue”), was to require everyone to carry insurance. This was ultimately the argument which convinced none other than Barack Obama, who remember, opposed an individual mandate during the Democrat primary campaign in 2008.