Obama Open To Individual Mandates But With Robust Hardship Protections
In an ABC interview that aired on Wednesday, President Barack Obama acknowledged that his thinking on an individual mandate for insurance coverage has "evolved" since the days of the campaign, when he routinely attacked his primary opponent, then Sen. Hillary Clinton, for the idea.
Later in the day, however, the White House spokesman Robert Gibbs stressed that Obama wasn't straying too far from his initial objections to required coverage, stressing that any mandate would have to include a "pretty stringent hardship waiver" for those individuals who could not pay for insurance.
Speaking at the Daily Press briefing, Gibbs acknowledged that Obama had done some rethinking on the mandate matter. The primary motive, he said, was that major stakeholders in the debate would not support any compromise proposal that did not require the vast majority of 49 million uninsured Americans to be brought into the pool of consumers.
"As the process moves forward in the Senate and the House the president wants to be flexible to the degree to which a piece of legislation will come forward," Gibbs said. "In terms of ensuring that everyone is covered, the president is now open to this idea. I think ... with all the parties and stakeholders involved, there has been discussion that it would be hard to get everyone at the table to stay at the table, if you are not getting that larger universe of people covered."
The remarks cap what has been a gradual, but widely predicted, move by the White House. During the campaign, the president stressed that an individual mandate would be overly burdensome to families who could not afford the costs. But on Wednesday, the president told ABC's Diane Sawyer, "People have made some pretty compelling arguments to me that if we want to have a system that drives down costs for everybody, then we've got to have healthier people not opt out of the system," said Obama.
Adding a bit of meat to the bones, Gibbs said on Wednesday that the president's original concern had not changed and that he would press for additions to the mandate to protect financially vulnerable consumers.
"If the help that they are getting is still not sufficient enough for them to afford it," Gibbs said, "we have to examine a robust hardship waiver."
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First Posted: 06-24-09 02:37 PM | Updated: 06-24-09 03:04 PM