Yesterday, Newt Gingrich did not answer questions regarding his past support for an individual health insurance mandate, as a recently discovered audio clip recorded in May 2009 showed. Here’s what Gingrich said then:
In an email, Gingrich communications director Joe DeSantis said the audio is “nothing new.”
No legislation had even been introduced at that point, so he could not have been commenting on ObamaCare. When legislation was introduced, Newt fervently and consistently opposed it.
DeSantis claims that Gingrich, at the time, was not talking about a federal “insurance requirement,” but the context of the entire conversation, during which Gingrich was laying out the policy goals of his Center for Health Transformation, suggests that’s exactly to what the former House speaker was referring.
In May of 2009, President Barack Obama, whose approval rating was around 64 percent, was initiating the legislative process that was to become Obamacare. The conference call on which Gingrich made these comments was in direct response to a White House press conference on health care reform. If Gingrich wasn’t talking about national policy when he said that “everybody should either have health insurance” or have to post a bond, then what was he talking about? A plan for each state to implement, like what Mitt Romney did in Massachusetts? The campaign has not responded to my follow-up questions.
It’s worth noting that at the same time Gingrich was endorsing the insurance requirement and praising Obama’s initial efforts at health care reform, some conservatives, like James Capretta and Yuval Levin, were warning about the problem of Obamacare. Here’s part of what Capretta and Levin wrote for the May 18, 2009 issue of THE WEEKLY STANDARD:
This is clearly intended to be transitory, rather than a final program. It would create incentives for employers to drop their health coverage plan (by making it cheaper to pay the fine than offer coverage) and would enable the new public insurance plan to undersell private insurers by imposing price controls similar to those employed in Medicare. A large number of workers finding themselves without their old employer-based coverage would “opt” for the public plan, creating, in effect, a massive new public health insurance program. Call it single payer by degrees.
