From NEWSMAX:
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said Sunday that he strongly supports a federal mandate requiring citizens to buy health insurance – a position that has been rejected by many Republicans, including several who likely will be running against him for the Republican presidential nomination.
Appearing on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Gingrich told host David Gregory that he continues to advocate for a plan he first called for in the early 1990s as a Congressman, which requires every uninsured citizen to purchase or acquire health insurance.
Gregory played a clip of Gingrich speaking during an appearance on Meet the Press in October 1993:
“I am for people, individuals — exactly like automobile insurance — individuals having health insurance and being required to have health insurance. And I am prepared to vote for a voucher system which will give individuals, on a sliding scale, a government subsidy so we insure that everyone as individuals have health insurance.”
Click here to read the full article.
Why wouldn’t he be? The individual mandate has been one of the greatest windfalls for the insurance industry ever. Insurance companies stand to increase their customer base by many millions. That being said, consider the fact that insurance products offered for individual purchase are often limited in their scope and only the most expensive, and therefor least attainable policies actually provide adequate coverage.
The idea that the individual mandate will somehow be a panacea for the flaws in our healthcare system is terribly flawed. The individual mandate, in the absence of governmental cost controls and a single payer system, will only serve to make Americans functionally poorer as they are forced by law to buy a product from a business. Health insurance costs will not go down. In fact, I seriously doubt that annual premium increases will decrease at all. Health care costs – note the difference – will not go down either, because our private, for profit system of health care provides absolutely zero incentives for low cost, high quality care.
Don’t be fooled by some altruistic political gestures “granting” healthcare to all. That certainly hasn’t happened. The only thing we’ve all been guaranteed is a new bill each month, unless we’re lucky to work for one of the few remaining businesses offering low cost health insurance as a benefit of employment.
The rich get richer and the beat goes on.