May 2011: Newt Gingrich Says He Supports The Individual Mandate

He supports a "variation" of it, but it's not really even a variation: His idea is that you're required to pay for health insurance, or post a big bond (your money, but you can't touch it, as it's held as a bond) to cover any potential health care costs you might encounter.

Presumably, if you refused to do that, you'd be fined... which is just the individual mandate. The only "variation" here is that Gingrich would allow very wealth self-insurers to post a bond in lieu of buying insurance.

Fine. Whatever.

Just don't tell me that Romney would merely "manage the decay" of the big government social welfare state while Gingrich would "fundamentally" shake it up.

As I've said before, the dominant strain of thinking in the past couple of decades was neoconservatism, which was proposing alternate solutions (preferably without as much government involvement) to the liberal checklist of problems that needed to be addressed.

Gingrich was and still is a big neocon. So was and is Romney.

Now since then, this style of "solution" has been greatly criticized by many conservatives as being, fundamentally, part of the problem.

But if you can overlook one you can overlook the other.

Oh, right: Except Gingrich, in the past several months, apparently discovered he'd been wrong for twenty years about this.

posted by Ace at 11:27 AM

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