In an otherwise decent article in today's Washington Post, staffer Amy Goldstein suggested that the U.S. health insurance industry is ideologically conservative despite its support for the controversial and unconstitutional "individual mandate" provision of ObamaCare.
The relevant portion is found midway through her page A3 article, "Mandatory coverage moves to forefront of health-care debate":
The debate over whether the mandate is essential does not split neatly along ideological lines. The insurance industry, a part of the health-care system that the White House has vilified, shares the administration's view that the mandate must accompany other insurance rules in the law.
Of course, the real reason the insurance industry backs the individual mandate is that it's good for their business. On some level, what industry group wouldn't mind a federal law requiring Americans to buy its products under penalty of law?
The ideological and more importantly constitutional question at play with the individual mandate has everything to do with limiting government from overreaching its constitutional bounds.
It has nothing to do with the economics of health care reform and everything to with the unconstitutional and immoral notion of forcing Americans to buy something from a private vendor under penalty of law.
True, the health insurance lobby has until recently been more sympathetic to the GOP than Democrats, but the political expediency of the relationship doesn't mean the insurance lobby has an ideological commitment to conservatism.
Reporters for major newspapers should know better than to confuse cynical rent-seeking enterprises with principled constitutional conservatives.
