In Defense of J.D. Kleinke
On Sunday the New York Times published an op-ed by American Enterprise Institute fellow J.D. Kleinke, entitled “The Conservative Case for Obamacare.” In recent days, the piece has drawn a great deal of pushback from right-leaning commentators.
Some of the criticism is justified, for the article itself is internally inconsistent. Even as it claims the law is market-based, the article talks about Obamacare’s “forcibl[e] repatriat[ion]” of individuals who choose not to purchase health coverage – and any “market” that relies upon coercion isn’t really a market at all. It attempts to equate Obamacare with association health plans, when the former is the antithesis of the latter – association health plans were designed to allow small business to opt-out of onerous state benefit mandates, whereas Obamacare imposes a whole new cohort of benefit mandates at the federal level.
Kleinke’s article is also misleading and factually inaccurate on critical points. He claims that “Republicans conveniently forgot that [an individual mandate] was something many of them had supported for years.” The only problem with that claim is that Kleinke conveniently forgot that an individual mandate was something many Republicans had opposed for decades:
- Conservatives made the claim in 1993 that an individual mandate was unconstitutional, claims which quickly gained resonance.
- In “The System” – the seminal account of the Clintoncare debate – Haynes Johnson and David Broder note that by the time Senate Republicans gathered in Annapolis in mid-1994, the individual mandate was an area of much controversy within the Conference (page 363).
- Senator Don Nickles – who introduced a bill that included an individual mandate in the fall of 1993 – introduced an entirely new version of the same bill seven months later – one which excluded the mandate. In comments in the Congressional Record back in June 1994, Nickles noted that “as we received input from the states, it is my belief that this individual mandate should be dropped from the legislation.” (Record, June 16, 1994, page S7085).
- Two dozen Senate co-sponsors – more than half the Republican Conference at the time – agreed with Nickles’ view, and dropped the mandate from the bill.
So there is ample evidence that an individual mandate was not conservative orthodoxy back in 1993-94, let alone 2008. Senator Nickles pointed all this out in a letter to the editor published in the Times earlier this year – meaning the facts were, and are, readily available for all those who wish to search for them. Sadly, however, Kleinke, like Ezra Klein and others, failed to do so, perhaps because the “Republicans switched positions on the mandate to defeat Obama” meme is too politically valuable to abandon. One would have hoped that an AEI scholar would have been slightly more thorough in his research than a liberal “JournoList.” Unfortunately, that does not appear to have been the case.
On the other hand, it’s worth examining the behavior of liberal analysts over the past several months:
- The Center for American Progress took two opposing positions on Medicare reform in as many days;
- An article in the Times back in March quoted Administration sources implying that Jonathan Gruber received a $400,000 government contract from HHS – a contract that Gruber failed to disclose on multiple occasions – in part because he served on a CBO advisory panel and therefore would be able to help the Administration achieve favorable scores from CBO;
- Both Gruber and Harvard professor David Cutler were exposed as taking public positions against premium support in Medicare, even as they privately advocated in favor of this Medicare reform; and
- Cutler, after testifying before the Senate Budget Committee in February that Barack Obama accurately characterized Cutler’s work when claiming that his health plan could cut premiums by $2,500 per year, told Politifact in August the exact opposite – that candidate Obama made “misstatements” at variance with Cutler’s own research.
Given this behavior from the left’s purported “scholars,” Kleinke benefits himself from the soft bigotry of low expectations. Yes, his piece is factually incorrect, and logically and philosophically inconsistent. But hey – at least he’s not being two-faced about his position.