Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

Yes, Stuart Butler of the Heritage Foundation is a bullshit artist. Why do you ask?

Kenneth Thomas:

Middle Class Political Economist: Heritage Doubles Down on Individual Mandate Denialism: [T]he Heritage Foundation has been bellowing against the Affordable Care Act despite the fact that the critical elements (individual mandate, community rating, and subsidies so everyone can afford insurance) were first proposed by -- the Heritage Foundation!In USA Today (via Don Taylor) Stuart Butler, author of the Heritage lecture linked above, says "Don't Blame Heritage for ObamaCare Mandate." He writes:

The confusion arises from the fact that 20 years ago, I held the view that as a technical matter, some form of requirement to purchase insurance was needed in a near-universal insurance market to avoid massive instability through "adverse selection" (insurers avoiding bad risks and healthy people declining coverage). At that time, President Clinton was proposing a universal health care plan, and Heritage and I devised a viable alternative. My view was shared at the time by many conservative experts, including American Enterprise Institute (AEI) scholars, as well as most non-conservative analysts. Even libertarian-conservative icon Milton Friedman, in a 1991 Wall Street Journal article, advocated replacing Medicare and Medicaid "with a requirement that every U.S. family unit have a major medical insurance policy." My idea was hardly new. Heritage did not invent the individual mandate.

What this self-serving narrative omits, as Taylor points out, is any mention of Butler's original proposal, linked above, from October 1989. This is more than three years prior to the Clinton health care legislation he claimed to be opposing. Butler's entire article puts his support of the mandate in "the 1990s," despite the fact that he had to have been conducting research on it prior to lecturing on it in 1989. Indeed, he cites no publication prior to his own where an individual mandate was proposed. That doesn't mean one isn't out there, but he gives us no reason to think there is.

He continues:

Additionally, the meaning of the individual mandate we are said to have "invented" has changed over time. Today it means the government makes people buy comprehensive benefits for their own good, rather than our original emphasis on protecting society from the heavy medical costs of free riders.

This is a very strained distinction. I'm not aware of the President or any other supporter of the mandate (I myself would prefer single payer) claiming people are to be forced to buy insurance "for their own good." Just as with Governor Romney's health care reform in Massachusetts, the idea behind the individual mandate remains preventing free riders from not getting insurance until they are sick. That is crucial in making it possible to require insurance companies to insure anyone regardless of pre-existing conditions….

While I guess it is in some way intellectually appealing to see Butler try to explicitly defend his changed position, the fact of the matter is that his defense is entirely bogus. You don't craft a policy in 1989 to defend against a proposal in 1993 by a President who hasn't been elected yet. No, the truth of the matter is that the individual mandate was the conservative approach to expanding health care access right up until the time President Obama advanced it as his own. Then it became both bad policy, and unconstitutional, to boot.