Politics Daily has a good piece describing the implications of the individual mandate to purchase health insurance, which is likely to be the linchpin of any federal “health-care reform” passed this year. The Obama administration can drop the “public option” and still achieve its ultimate ends via the mandate. The columnist, Patricia Murphy, aptly describes the debate that exists, or at least used to exist, on the Right about the issue:

Although a handful of congressional Republicans have objected to individual mandates, the earliest backers of the concept were influential Republican leaders and lawmakers, including the late Sen. John Chaffee (R-R.I.), a moderate who proposed it in 1993.
Then-Gov. Mitt Romney, took up the cause for individual mandates as he pushed for universal health care in Massachusetts. Romney claimed victory in a 2006 Wall Street Journal op-ed titled “Health care for everyone? We found a way.” In that essay, Romney noted proudly — and accurately — that he had proposed the individual mandate in his state, calling it a “personal responsibility principle,” and had shepherded the measure through a Democratic legislature. “A free ride on government is not libertarian,” Romney wrote. Now a possible favorite for the 2012 presidential nomination, Romney has since distanced himself from the Massachusetts approach, apparently in efforts to court his party’s conservative base.
And as recently as this month, Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) told PBS that the way to get universal coverage is “through an individual mandate and that’s individual responsibility and even Republicans believe in individual responsibility.”

Most conservatives and perhaps most Republicans now oppose the mandate. A Heritage Foundation analyst is quoted in the piece as offering strong objections. That’s a most welcome position, given the past history with which some of us are intimately familiar.

A mandate to buy health insurance would be the root of all subsequent evil. It would be the beginning of the end of consumer-driven health care and a massive gift to the dominant players in the current health-insurance industry, who by no means want consumers to acquire more choices and power. On that point, actually, some conspiracy-minded folks on the Left are quite right — though of course their preferred policy, a government-run health plan, wouldn’t be good for consumers either.