Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Jon Cohn asks a question about the provision in the healthcare reform bill that requires everyone to get health insurance:

The individual mandate continues to be health care reform’s most controversial element, both in the courts and on the campaign trail. And many of the mandate’s critics see this as a matter of principle. Requiring people to carry health insurance, they say, compromises individual freedom. I don’t agree with that argument, but I understand it.

What I don’t understand is why the requirement scares people without such strong libertarian instincts.

Answer: it doesn’t.

This is what makes writing about policy so frustrating. The answer to Jon’s question is pretty obvious. Conservatives have no problem in general with mandating behavior. Nor do they have any problem with mandating affirmative behavior. In the context of healthcare reform, many of them have supported the individual mandate in the past. And the smart ones, at least, understand perfectly well why a mandate is necessary in order to make the broader healthcare reform package work.

Their opposition isn’t based on any special principle. It’s based on the fact that (a) they don’t like healthcare reform and (b) people don’t really like being forced to do stuff. This makes the mandate a convenient point of attack. Most non-libertarians don’t really care about the mandate, but once Glenn and Sean and Rush have them suitably foaming at the mouth about Barack Obama’s relentless attack on all that we hold dear in this country, getting them upset about the mandate is a pretty easy upsell.

But you can’t just say this, even though it’s plainly true. You have to pretend to take conservative arguments about this seriously. You have to write detailed responses, complete with quotes from law professors and health experts. You have to pretend that this is an actual issue, not just a handy attack point. And so we all spend mountains of time in a sort of pundit fantasyland where we all agree to talk about stuff that we all know nobody truly cares about.

Anyway: Conservatives don’t like Barack Obama. They don’t like social welfare programs. They don’t like healthcare reform. So they’re looking for handy ways to attack it, and the mandate fits the bill. Liberals would do the same thing if the shoe were on the other foot. There’s no need to complicate what’s going on here.1

1I will, of course, continue to complicate this kind of thing regularly myself. It’s what I do, after all. But I’m pretty sure that I lose a hundredth of an IQ point every time I do, which means my career as a writer is probably self limiting.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate