No. of Recommendations: 3
So you agree with MAGA and SCOTUS about the individual mandate in ObamaCare. I respect your opinion but i really wish the individial mandate ha stayed in I felt it was wise good policy.
The legal question is a bit tricky. However, I think SCOTUS got it wrong. We were being required to buy insurance. It was up to us whom we bought it from. If the law had said "you must buy from United Healthcare", then I would have agreed with SCOTUS. But that's not what it said. I believe some states still required you purchase auto insurance to register your car. Arizona dropped that requirement several years ago (which was a bad idea). This is no different, really.
The right tries to deny it, but the individual mandate was "invented" by the right-wing Heritage Foundation to address the "free rider" problem in the Republican counter-proposal to "HillaryCare"**. There may have been some differences around the edges, but the core was the same idea. The ACA used that concept to address the same problem.
You shouldn't be forced, nudged, coerced into buying an "EV" or certaqin kind of bbq grill or air conditioner or washing machine.
I'm OK with that, to a point. Creating incentives for people to change behavior is an acceptable means of changing society. I have no problem with EV tax credits (combats air pollution, climate change, water pollution -remember the Gulf of Mexico?-, etc), or higher efficiency standards, or things like that. I do have a problem with direct subsidies for producers (sugar, corn, oil, etc). Another incentive is taxes...like on tobacco. Those can work, also. It's a matter of opinion when it goes too far. I don't think there's a bright line there. But I will note that almost no cars had airbags until the US government mandated them. It was cheaper to make cars without them, so that's what manufacturers did.
**Which, as I recall, also relied on insurance companies, as opposed to HillaryCare that was more of a single-payer thing. Obama basically resurrected the Republican counter-proposal, and passed it. They were by no means identical, but the core of each was private insurance with an individual mandate.
