I absolutely believe Reagan would have been pro Obamacare. Here's why:
Reagan opposed Medicare for two principal reasons: participation was mandatory, and because Medicare spent scarce taxpayer funds to subsidize coverage for wealthy people who didn’t need the help.
So we can gather from this quote that Reagan probably would have been against the individual mandate, which no longer exists anyway. However, I think he would have approved of most of it. Reagan explicitly supported the role of government in subsidizing care for every American who could not otherwise afford it.
Quote from "A Time for Choosing"
“No one in this country should be denied medical care for lack of funds.”
In a speech to the Phoenix chamber of commerce:
“Any person in the United States who requires medical attention and cannot provide for himself should have it provided for him.”
He championed the Kerr-Mills Act of 1960, a law introduced by two Democrats that gave federal money to states with which to provide medical care for the elderly in need. Reagan said that he was “in favor of this bill — and if the money isn’t enough, I think we should put up more.”
In fact, CW, I bet you would also be in favor of 90% of Obamacare provisions. When this was going into effect it was my job to analyze the potential impact to my employer at the time, so I am very familiar with it.
Hmmm. I will have to think about your points.
ObamaCare did not help me any. My costs went up. I realize that that doesn't necessarily make it bad policy.
The individual mandate was the worst thing about it. Suddenly, the federal government was making its citizens purchase a product that they didn't necessarily want or need as the cost of being an American citizen. IMO, that was wrong on principle.
And, IMO, it was wrong when SCOTUS decided that it was not a mandate but merely a tax. I think that John Roberts caved on that for political reasons. A different Justice Roberts, first name Owen, in the 1937 case of
West Coast Hotel v. Parrish, reversed his own previous vote in a similar case. It was perceived to have been an attempt to defuse the appeal of FDR's "court-packing plan." A humorist called it "the switch in time that saved nine."
Another reason that I opposed it was that it was quite obvious that it was intended as a step toward total government control of health-care insurance. A step toward "single-payer," as Obama and others admitted at times when they didn't think they were on camera.
So, as I saw it then, and still do, it was a bad policy and a dishonest policy in that it was not intended to fix problems but rather to pave the way for even more government involvement.
Now, without the individual mandate, it is just yet another federal program that we can't pay for and is digging us deeper and deeper into national debt.
