According to Roy Blunt, Mandate Now Not a Big Deal
Leaving aside (for now) the facts that the latest post from Post-Dispatch's Jake Wagman
- ignores Roy Blunt's actual record of big talk and little action for people with pre-existing conditions
- ignores the incredible callousness of Blunt's suggestion that uninsured people with pre-existing conditions are folks "who’ve done nothing to take care of themselves," and
- trivializes a substantive policy dispute into an opinion piece about "spin,"
I'm very intrigued by this new argument from Blunt:
He believes people will chose to go uninsured as long as they can because, according to him, the financial penalty for not having coverage is less than the cost of insurance.
“People will figure out quickly how to game this system,” Blunt said. “It’s not very complicated.”
Should somebody who refuses to pay for coverage be able to get it when they need it — at the same prices as those who have been paying all along? Will large number of Americans really attempt to “game” the system?
The questions are ones reasonable people can probably disagree on.
The whole basis for the Republican argument against a health insurance mandate is that it's an outrageous, onerous requirement that robs people of freedom and destroys everything that's great about America. In Peter Kinder's words, the new insurance requirements and associated tax penalties for not having insurance are "a fundamental assault on our freedom that is transforming this country into something that is unrecognizable from the country you and I grew up in and love."
But now, Roy Blunt is convinced that those tax penalties aren't that big of a deal, and a lot of folks will "game this system." Fascinating.
