This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2014, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Mia Love looked me right in the eye and said, "People should not be forced to buy health insurance."
Seven days later, Love, Republican candidate for Utah's 4th Congressional District seat, was the object of uninhibited campaign-rally praise from the inventor of the individual mandate, Mitt Romney.
Of course, when Romney created the mandate to purchase health insurance, he was the governor of Massachusetts. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts. As that official name might suggest, they like civilization there. They played an outsized role in founding the American version of it.
In 2006, Republican Gov. Romney and the Democratic-led Massachusetts Legislature agreed to an utterly civilized solution to the quandary of how to provide near universal access to health care something residents of every nation we would recognize as belonging to the 21st century have taken for granted for generations without placing all the burden on the already overwhelmed health-care delivery system.
The law, retroactively dubbed Romneycare, included the individual mandate. If you can afford it, you buy health insurance. If you can't, the state will provide you with a tax subsidy so you can.
Romney's oft-spoken justification then was that every one of us is all but certain, at some point in our lives, to place demands costly demands on the health care system. If you don't have insurance, or only started paying for it when you got sick, then you are enjoying the benefits of a huge, innovative, effective and bloody expensive system without paying any of the cost.
That makes you a freeloader. And being a freeloader is the polar opposite of what Romney and other Republicans supposedly stand for individual responsibility.
The mandate was such a good idea that it became the cornerstone of the federal Affordable Care Act aka Obamacare only four years later.
Not only was the mandate rolled into Obamacare, it quite arguably was the key point that made its enactment possible. Otherwise, any real health care reform would be based on more liberal ideas. Ideas that would quite justifiably minimize or destroy private health insurance. Ideas that would have doomed any plan to failure in a Congress that, even nominally under Democratic control, would never stand up to the monied interests of insurance companies and drug makers.
Ideas such as the public option, which candidate Barack Obama proposed and President Obama abandoned. Ideas such as single payer, more easily understood as Medicare for all. More logically extended from the individual mandate that has existed on everybody's paycheck since 1966, the deduction often labeled FICA or HI.
But that was then. Now, after an interregnum during which he ran for president, ran against the key ideas of his own health care innovation, ran not as a candidate from icky liberal Massachusetts so much as from conservative Mormonland, Romney has officially transferred his flag to Utah.
And civilization here is not what we are about. Not what gets you get elected to Congress, or to the Legislature.
We like our freedom. Freedom to shirk our duty to our fellow citizens, if we are rich, or to die quietly of untreated cancer or uncontrolled diabetes, if we are not.
Freedom to falsely deny, as Love is, Obamacare's slow but marked success in not only expanding access to health care but also chopping away at the cost-quality paradox by penalizing providers for readmissions, errors and hospital-acquired infections and experimenting with more efficient, and humane, protocols for treating the poor and homeless.
As has notably been said on this page before, all would benefit from the return of the Massachusetts Mitt. But, then, that person would never be seen campaigning for Mia Love.
George Pyle, a Tribune editorial writer, has been paying into Medicare for 38 years. And there will be hell to pay if he doesn't get his money's worth.
Twitter: @debatestate