Dems accuse GOP insurance reform critics of 'rank hypocrisy'

House Democrats, defending the individual insurance mandate in their healthcare reform law, are pushing back against Republicans who want to repeal the provision, noting that the concept has a long history of support among GOP leaders.

"Washington Republicans tried to repeal one of the few decent health care ideas they have come up with — the individual mandate," Doug Thornell, spokesman for Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), wrote in an e-mail. "This was at the heart of Romneycare in Massachusetts and the GOP health proposal in ‘93." 

The Democrats' health reform law requires most Americans to purchase insurance by 2014 or face financial penalties. The provision not only rallied the support of the powerful insurance lobby, but also was seen as a necessary step to grow insurance pools in order to control coverage costs for sicker patients.

Republicans, though, have blasted the requirement for violating basic American freedoms. And on Tuesday, Rep. Dave Camp (Mich.) offered legislation to repeal the mandate. 

"The federal government has never required its citizens to purchase a particular product before," said Camp, the senior Republican on the Ways and Means Committee.

(His amendment failed by a vote of 230 to 187.)

Yet Republican leaders haven't always been so critical of the individual mandate. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), ranking member on the Finance Committee, told Fox News last year that the mandate surrounding car insurance should also apply to health coverage. "Everybody has some health insurance costs, and if you aren’t insured, there’s no free lunch," Grassley said. "Somebody else is paying for it. ... I believe that there is a bipartisan consensus to have individual mandates."

More recently, former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) said that the individual mandate is "about the only way" to fix the nation's fragmented healthcare system. 

"We have 46 million people who don’t have insurance out there," Frist told Fox News last September. "Somebody’s going to have to pay for that. If they can pay for it, they should be responsible to paying for it."  

Such statements haven't gone unnoticed by Democratic leaders, who voted Tuesday to preserve the mandate.

"It’s hard to determine which is worse," Thornell wrote, "their rank hypocrisy or voting to raise premiums in the exchange by 40% and severely undermining employer sponsored healthcare."