Republican doubletalk at an all time high?

Groucho Marx once said, “Those are my principles. If you don’t like them, I have others.” Who knew Groucho was a Republican presidential candidate?

All of the current contenders have been outspoken about their vigorous opposition to the Affordable Care Act. Many have also criticized fellow candidate Mitt Romney for the universal health care law he signed as governor of Massachusetts. But it turns out that many of the candidates previously supported aspects of the health care law—that is, before they were against them.

As Politico notes, Newt Gingrich, for example, “has been on record for nearly two decades as backing a requirement to purchase health insurance.” But when pressed about his position, Gingrich responded, “That was a clip from 1993, when in fact, the conservative position was to have individual insurance, in opposition to Hillarycare.…” So it seems Gingrich doesn’t actually have a policy viewpoint, he just opposes any Democratic proposal.

Politico also notes that Tim Pawlenty and Jon Huntsman, both former governors, studied the Massachusetts health care system when considering health reform in their states. At a Minneapolis health reform forum in 2006, Pawlenty “proposed that Minnesota ‘chart a path toward universal coverage’,” and he noted that an individual mandate was a piece in the larger puzzle of the solution, but not a solution itself. In 2007, he advocated setting up an insurance exchange—the centerpiece of the health care law that he now opposes so adamantly. And, as recently as last week at an AHIP conference, he promoted the creation of accountable care organizations (ACOs), which he believes will bring down the cost of health care by “paying providers for better medical care rather than just more of it.” And yet he wants to repeal the very law that calls for such innovation.

Jon Huntsman, who instituted an insurance exchange in Utah in 2008, also studied Massachusetts when shaping his state’s exchange and looked into the idea of an individual mandate. When asked about his position on mandates in a 2007 interview about health reform in Utah, he responded:

[A] mandate has to be part of [health reform] in some way, shape, or form whether it's the college age population or whether it's something beyond, it's got to be a serious attempt, and I'm not sure you get to the point of serious attempt without some sort of mandate associated with what you're trying to do…. [N]obody likes the word mandate, but without that kind of insistence--that directness, I don't know that you can achieve something this challenging in a short period of time, which is what I think we need to do as a nation.

So it seemed he was not only supportive of an individual mandate for Utah, but for the country, until he ran up against “a health insurance lobby and a Republican legislature that quickly quashed the idea.”

These candidates were supportive of these policies for good reason—they are effective. And together, as part of the Affordable Care Act, they will reduce spending in our health care system and make affordable, quality health care coverage accessible to all Americans. It is unfortunate that politics have forced these candidates to change their positions, but let’s hope they find out that putting politics ahead of people is never a winning strategy.