As a Candidate, Obama Agreed With Judges Ruling on Healthcare Law

2 Responses to As a Candidate, Obama Agreed With Judges Ruling on Healthcare Law

1. Chris says:

   Tuesday, February 1, 2011 at 6:48 pm

   Tina–“the President agreed that one of the more controversial elements of the bill was unconstitutional”

   This is untrue. Absolutely nowhere in the video does Obama say or even imply that the individual mandate is unconstitutional. If he believed it was, I doubt he’d still call Hilary’s idea “a good plan” with only a “slight difference” from his own.

   Obama’s plan for universal healthcare has clearly changed along the way, largely due to pressure from Republicans. As long as we’re talking about changing opinions, it’s interesting that Republicans now say the individual mandate is unconstitutional, even though it was Republicans who originally proposed it.

   The house metaphor Obama uses in the video is pretty dumb, though.

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2. Tina says:

   Tuesday, February 1, 2011 at 8:46 pm

   Chris youre right he doesn’t say it’s unconstitutional.

   His comparison about government forcing people to buy a house to end homelessness does get at the heart of the matter as the judge indicated:

   http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703445904576118492968495006.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

   “Never before has Congress required everyone buy a product from a private company (essentially for life) just for being alive and residing in the United States,” wrote Judge Vinson. “It is difficult to imagine that a nation which began, at least in part, as the result of opposition to a British mandate giving the East India Company a monopoly and imposing a nominal tax on all tea sold in America would have set out to create a government with the power to force people to buy tea in the first place . . . Surely this is not what the Founding Fathers could have intended.”

   Judge Vinson even used President Obama’s own words against him when he commented in a footnote that as a presidential candidate in 2008, Mr. Obama had argued that there were much better ways to achieve health reform than forcing Americans to buy insurance.

   “Then-Senator Obama supported a health-care reform proposal that did not include an individual mandate because he was at that time strongly opposed to the idea, stating that, ‘If a mandate was the solution, we can try that to solve homelessness by mandating everybody to buy a house,'” Judge Vinson wrote.

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