Analysis: Politicians and Health Care
Is Romney doing a flip flop on healthcare?
NPR-Question: If government and business leaders do their part to lower the cost of health insurance, should people be required to sign up?
Republican Mitt Romney used to answer yes.
Now he says no.
Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton says yes or no — or maybe. It depends on the definition of “require.”
The way these and other 2008 presidential candidates answer the “individual mandate” question says as much about their characters, their strategies and the tricky politics of health care reform as it does about the actual policies.
“Individual mandate” is the jargon politicians use to describe health care plans that assume every citizen will enroll in health insurance, often with subsidies and under threat of penalty.
