(CNN) — A student, a senior. A Democrat, a Republican. Someone with health insurance, someone with a pre-existing condition, someone with no insurance. Someone who’s employed, and someone who’s not. A doctor. A Massachusetts resident.

They all have different experiences and interests when it comes to health care, and they all have views on the sweeping health care bill that President Obama signed into law Tuesday. Click through the gallery above to meet people from all walks of life and learn their personal views on the health care overhaul and how they think it will affect us. Their answers may surprise you. CONTINUED

Diverse backgrounds color health care views in ways you may not expect – CNN.com

Though Republican lawmakers now vilify the individual mandate for health insurance coverage as unconstitutional, the provision has long roots in conservative health care philosophy and has been supported by such GOP presidents as Richard Nixon and George H.W. Bush.

Republican administrations were among the first to embrace the concept of forcing individuals to buy coverage. Nixon — hoping to stave off the single-payer ethos of many congressional Democrats — explored the idea in the 1970s, though Republicans now dismiss those discussions as the byproduct of a moderate president searching for a domestic policy victory.

Less than two decades later, in what remains an unexplored chapter of health care history, a surprising supporter of the individual mandate was George H.W. Bush. According to contemporaneous reporting, Bush used "the tax system to ‘encourage and empower’ individuals to buy health insurance and would enact insurance market reforms that make it possible for everyone — even if they have pre-existing health problems — to get insurance." In short: individuals would be mandated to buy catastrophic health insurance. The cost of that coverage would be tied to income, meaning that the poorer you were, the less expensive your policy would be.

 

Coverage of Preventive Services Provisions of Selected Current Health –

CONTINUED

Individual Mandate, Now Vilified By GOP, Was Supported By George H.W. Bush

Owned

Sorry Republicans. Your cost-control ideas belong to Democrats now.

Neera Tanden March 29, 2010 | 1:00 am

 

On the day of the historic House vote on the Senate bill and reconciliation package, conservative pundit David Frum wrote a piece titled "Waterloo," in which he stated that “conservatives and Republicans today suffered their most crushing legislative defeat since the 1960s.” Frum argued that, by opposing the entire legislative effort as a means to cripple the Obama presidency and refusing to negotiate in good faith, the Republicans ensured they would have no part in shaping the most significant domestic policy of the last 40 years. “Barack Obama badly wanted Republican votes for his plan," Frum explained. "Could we have leveraged his desire to align the plan more closely with conservative views?” The answer is clearly yes.

And the consequences will be large. By unilaterally ceding control over the contents of the health bill, Republicans have also ceded any claim to the policy innovations therein. Ideas that were once championed by conservatives have now been adopted by Democrats, who have become their primary champion. Going forward, if they are successful, these ideas will be permanently considered Democratic achievements.

One of the best examples of such a conservative issue is cost control. For decades, cost-conscious Republicans criticized the way health care is delivered in our country. They argued that generous insurance plans, combined with the fee-for-service system in which doctors, hospitals, and other providers are reimbursed for each point of service they deliver, creates incentives for overuse. Incentives work in health care like they do in other markets: If you pay someone to do something, they will do it a lot. Because we must pay for each check-up, each consultation, each test, the system encourages providers to approve unnecessary care for higher payment. So the fee-for-service system rewards volume over quality of care. By realigning the system to provide better market incentives, moderate conservatives argued, we could wring billions of wasted dollars out of the system. (Many also contended that we should control costs from the opposite direction, making consumers responsible for more of the cost for each service, and therefore reducing their incentive to "overconsume" health care.)

Liberals, in turn, defended this fee-for-service system from its critics, arguing that any alternative would limit access to needed care. They wanted to ensure that doctors and consumers had the primary say over health care, and fee-for-service, they argued, was the best way to guarantee that. They didn’t talk about "death panels," of course, but they did imply that a system which encouraged doctors to control costs might ultimately mean patients would suffer. CONTINUED

Owned | The New Republic

BE INFORMED! 

Republicans Were For Obama’s Health Insurance Rule Before They Were Against It

RICARDO ALONSO-ZALDIVAR | 03/27/10 10:14 AM |

WASHINGTON — Republicans were for President Barack Obama’s requirement that Americans get health insurance before they were against it.

The obligation in the new health care law is a Republican idea that’s been around at least two decades. It was once trumpeted as an alternative to Bill and Hillary Clinton’s failed health care overhaul in the 1990s. These days, Republicans call it government overreach.

Mitt Romney, weighing another run for the GOP presidential nomination, signed such a requirement into law at the state level as Massachusetts governor in 2006. At the time, Romney defended it as "a personal responsibility principle" and Massachusetts’ newest GOP senator, Scott Brown, backed it. Romney now says Obama’s plan is a federal takeover that bears little resemblance to what he did as governor and should be repealed.

Republicans say Obama and the Democrats co-opted their original concept, minus a mechanism they proposed for controlling costs. More than a dozen GOP attorneys general are determined to challenge the requirement in federal court as unconstitutional.

Starting in 2014, the new law will require nearly all Americans to have health insurance through an employer, a government program or by buying it directly. That year, new insurance markets will open for business, health plans will be required to accept all applicants and tax credits will start flowing to millions of people, helping them pay the premiums.

Those who continue to go without coverage will have to pay a penalty to the IRS, except in cases of financial hardship. Fines vary by income and family size. For example, a single person making $45,000 would pay an extra $1,125 in taxes when the penalty is fully phased in, in 2016.

Conservatives today say that’s unacceptable. Not long ago, many of them saw a national mandate as a free-market route to guarantee coverage for all Americans – the answer to liberal ambitions for a government-run entitlement like Medicare. Most experts agree some kind of requirement is needed in a reformed system because health insurance doesn’t work if people can put off joining the risk pool until they get sick.

In the early 1970s, President Richard Nixon favored a mandate that employers provide insurance. In the 1990s, the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, embraced an individual requirement. Not anymore.

"The idea of an individual mandate as an alternative to single-payer was a Republican idea," said health economist Mark Pauly of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. In 1991, he published a paper that explained how a mandate could be combined with tax credits – two ideas that are now part of Obama’s law. Pauly’s paper was well-received – by the George H.W. Bush administration.

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"It could have been the basis for a bipartisan compromise, but it wasn’t," said Pauly. "Because the Democrats were in favor, the Republicans more or less had to be against it."

Obama rejected a key part of Pauly’s proposal: doing away with the tax-free status of employer-sponsored health care and replacing it with a standard tax credit for all Americans. Labor strongly opposes that approach because union members usually have better-than-average coverage and suddenly would have to pay taxes on it. But many economists believe it’s a rational solution to America’s health care dilemma since it would raise enough money to cover the uninsured and nudge people with coverage into cost-conscious plans.

Romney’s success in Massachusetts with a bipartisan health plan that featured a mandate put the idea on the table for the 2008 presidential candidates.

Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton, who failed in the 1990s to require employers to offer coverage, embraced the individual requirement, an idea advocated by her Republican opponents in the earlier health care debate.

"Hillary Clinton believed strongly in universal coverage," said Neera Tanden, her top health care adviser in the 2008 Democratic campaign. "I said to her, ‘You are not going to be able to say it’s universal coverage unless you have a mandate.’ She said, ‘I don’t want to run unless it’s universal coverage.’"

Obama was not prepared to go that far. His health care proposal in the campaign required coverage for children, not adults. Clinton hammered him because his plan didn’t guarantee coverage for all. He shot back that health insurance is too expensive to force people to buy it.

Obama remained cool to an individual requirement even once in office. But Tanden, who went on to serve in the Obama administration, said the first sign of a shift came in a letter to congressional leaders last summer in which Obama said he’d be open to the idea if it included a hardship waiver. Obama openly endorsed a mandate in his speech to a joint session of Congress in September.

It remains one of the most unpopular parts of his plan. Even the insurance industry is unhappy. Although the federal government will be requiring Americans to buy their products – and providing subsidies worth billions – insurers don’t think the penalties are high enough.

Tanden, now at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, says she’s confident the mandate will work. In Massachusetts, coverage has gone up and only a tiny fraction of residents have been hit with fines.

Brown, whose election to replace the late Democratic Sen. Edward M. Kennedy almost led to the collapse of Obama’s plan, said his opposition to the new law is over tax increases, Medicare cuts and federal overreach on a matter that should be left up to states. Not so much the requirement, which he voted for as a state lawmaker.

"In Massachusetts, it helped us deal with the very real problem of uncompensated care," Brown said.

Republicans Were For Obama’s Health Insurance Rule Before They Were Against It

We need to act.

On Sunday night, many Congressional Democrats in tough districts cast courageous votes for health reform — even though they knew that insurance companies and their Republican allies would retaliate immediately.

Well, the attacks are here. Shameful, negative ads have already hit the airwaves. Democratic offices have been vandalized. Republicans are promising to repeal reform and smearing those who supported it.

But we’re ready to do what it takes to defend the heroes who made health reform possible.
These are the men and women who stood with us and the President to make good on a promise that our Party has fought to deliver for a century. And we will not leave them hanging out to dry.

Please chip in $5 or more to defend those in Congress who fought to make health reform possible.

These are the people who worked hand in hand with President Obama and grassroots Democrats to finally bring affordable coverage to 32 million more Americans, enact the toughest insurance regulations in history, and bring down costs for families, small businesses, and our government.

At a time of historic achievement for our country, Republicans and the extreme right wing are responding by pushing fear and intimidation.

They’ve launched a campaign to "fire" Nancy Pelosi, complete with imagery of the first female Speaker of the House surrounded by flames. Congresswoman Louise Slaughter had a brick thrown through her office window. A Virginia blog posted Congressman Tom Perriello’s home address, urging tea partiers to "drop by."

The Democratic National Committee is already fighting back hard, with a sophisticated ad strategy, events on the ground, and the best rapid-response program in the history of politics. But we need your help to keep it up.

Please chip in $5 or more:

http://my.democrats.org/Heroes

If we learned one thing from the fight for health reform, it’s this: Hope can triumph over fear, the truth can beat out the most vicious of lies, and our movement, organized, can overcome even the most powerful of opponents. Let’s not stop now.
Thanks,
Governor Tim Kaine
Chairman

Funny and so appropriate. This was Boehner’s behavior during his closing speech before the Healthcare Reform Bill passed.

An open letter to conservatives

March 22, 2010, 3:16PM

Dear Conservative Americans,

The years have not been kind to you. I grew up in a profoundly Republican home, so I can remember when you wore a very different face than the one we see now.  You’ve lost me and you’ve lost most of America.  Because I believe having responsible choices is important to democracy, I’d like to give you some advice and an invitation.

First, the invitation:  Come back to us.

Now the advice.  You’re going to have to come up with a platform that isn’t built on a foundation of cowardice: fear of people with colors, religions, cultures and sex lives that differ from your own; fear of reform in banking, health care, energy; fantasy fears of America being transformed into an Islamic nation, into social/commun/fasc-ism, into a disarmed populace put in internment camps; and more.  But you have work to do even before you take on that task.

Your party — the GOP — and the conservative end of the American political spectrum have become irresponsible and irrational.  Worse, it’s tolerating, promoting and celebrating prejudice and hatred.  Let me provide some examples — by no means an exhaustive list — of where the Right as gotten itself stuck in a swamp of hypocrisy, hyperbole, historical inaccuracy and hatred.

If you’re going to regain your stature as a party of rational, responsible people, you’ll have to start by draining this swamp:

Hypocrisy

You can’t flip out — and threaten impeachment - when Dems use a parliamentary procedure (deem and pass) that you used repeatedly (more than 35 times in just one session and more than 100 times in all!), that’s centuries old and which the courts have supported. Especially when your leaders admit it all.

You can’t vote and scream against the stimulus package and then take credit for the good it’s done in your own district (happily handing out enormous checks representing money that you voted against, is especially ugly) –  114 of you (at last count) did just that — and it’s even worse when you secretly beg for more.

You can’t fight against your own ideas just because the Dem president endorses your proposal.

You can’t call for a pay-as-you-go policy, and then vote against your own ideas.

Are they "unlawful enemy combatants" or are they "prisoners of war" at Gitmo? You can’t have it both ways.

You can’t carry on about the evils of government spending when your family has accepted more than a quarter-million dollars in government handouts.

You can’t refuse to go to a scheduled meeting, to which you were invited, and then blame the Dems because they didn’t meet with you.

You can’t rail against using teleprompters while using teleprompters. Repeatedly.

You can’t rail against the bank bailouts when you supported them as they were happening.

CONTINUED

An open letter to conservatives | AmericanDad’s Blog

Roberts: Beck ‘worse than a clown’

Cokie & Steve Roberts

Steve recently took part in a lunchtime panel sponsored by a local radio station. A beefy young man in the audience grabbed the microphone and challenged the speakers, in a sneering and confrontational tone, to name one good thing about President Obama’s health-care proposal.

Steve’s answer: People without insurance flood hospital emergency rooms and push up medical bills for everyone. So it would be in the "national interest" to expand insurance and hold down costs.

"The national interest?" retorted the questioner in an even louder voice. "That sounds like fascism!"

We have been in this business a long time. We welcome tough questions and certainly don’t believe we have all the answers. But "fascism"? That’s over the line — way over the line — for any sensible or civilized conversation.

We don’t know what the beefy guy reads or to whom he listens, but we would bet he’s a disciple of Glenn Beck. The popular author and broadcaster who has turned nonstop name-calling into an art form is a big fan of the "F-word."

On a recent show, Beck went after Christian churches that preach "social justice" (which includes just about all of them). "I beg you," he told his followers, "look for the words ‘social justice’ and ‘economic justice’ on your church Web site. If you find it, run as fast as you can. Social justice and economic justice, they are code words."

Then he explained what the "code words" mean: "Social justice was the rallying cry — economic justice and social justice — the rallying cry on both the communist front and the fascist front." In case anyone missed the point, he held up a swastika and a hammer and sickle as he ranted.

Beck has made millions spewing such incendiary language, but in the process he is corrupting the very essence of democracy. Our system can only flourish if citizens with varying viewpoints accept the outcome of elections and respect the rule of the majority.

But if you think your rivals are "fascists," if you consider politics a form of holy war, then you place yourself outside basic American traditions.

Beck is clearly a growth industry, but even his friends are starting to get uneasy, and they should.

After Beck denounced Obama in 2009 as a "racist" with "a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture," major advertisers quit supporting him. After Beck derided the Republican Party at a meeting of Tea Party activists, conservative talk-show host Mark Levin urged Beck "to stop acting like a clown" and added, "Decide what you are, a circus clown, self-identified, or a thoughtful and wise person. It’s hard to be both."

Executives at Fox News, where Beck’s 5 p.m. show is a huge hit, back their star in public, but Howard Kurtz reports in the Washington Post that there is a "deep split within Fox" over his impact on the network’s reputation. "Beck has become a constant topic of conversation among Fox journalists," Kurtz writes, "some of whom say they believe he uses distorted or inflammatory rhetoric and that undermines their credibility."

We defended Fox News when the White House attacked the network in 2009, partly because it employs many fine journalists, including several of Steve’s former students. But news folks at Fox are right to be worried. At some point, Beck’s fanaticism taints them all.

"They’re right on the cusp of losing their image as a news organization," says Andrew Tyndall, a respected television analyst.

We are not denying Beck or anyone else their First Amendment rights. He can say anything he wants. But advertisers don’t have to support his brand of hate mongering, and audiences don’t have to take Fox News seriously if one of its top names has become a "circus clown."

Actually, Beck is worse than a clown. He’s more like a terrorist who believes he has discovered the One True Faith, and condemns everyone else as a heretic. And that makes him something else as well — a traitor to the American values he professes so loudly to defend.

COKIE and STEVE ROBERTS are syndicated columnists (stevecokie@gmail.com).

GoErie.com: Other Opinions – Roberts: Beck ‘worse than a clown’

One of the president’s closest advisers said on Tuesday that Republican opponents of health care reform let down their guard following Sen. Scott Brown’s election in Massachusetts, in the process allowing Democrats and the administration to make a final, successful push for the bill.

In an interview with the Huffington Post hours after the president signed health care reform into law, senior adviser David Axelrod pointed to that special election in late January as a pivotal point in the long path to passing legislation.

"Some of the steam went out of the opposition after that," Axelrod said. "I think that people felt like they had made a statement. Perhaps they felt like they had killed health care reform… They thought the fight was over. And that [the president] couldn’t now succeed. I do believe that. And it is almost as if they had made the statement that they thought they had stopped the thing. And so it created a breathing space for us to regroup."

In the weeks that followed Brown’s win, indeed, the conventional wisdom held that the health care reform movement had come to a screeching, unexpected halt. It wasn’t just Republicans pushing the theory but some Democratic lawmakers who were also convinced that the time had come to move on.

At the White House, the president was presented with several options. Dropping health care reform entirely was dismissed. Going to a watered-down version of reform was considered but quickly rejected. The idea of regrouping, reselling and pushing again for the bill (this time using reconciliation) was ultimately chosen.

"[Massachusetts] raised issues that we had to confront," Axelrod explained. "What had we done to contribute to some of that unrest? And obviously there was tremendous unhappiness about the Nebraska deal and this gave us a chance to address some of those flaws."

Democratic National Committee chair Tim Kaine, in a separate interview with the Huffington Post, described the moment as a sobering one for the party. But a lot of the hysteria that accompanied Massachusetts, he added, wasn’t rooted in reality.

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"I was very troubled," he said. "People were really glum. And I was basically telling them, "Hey, wait a minute. We’ve got 59 Democratic senators and only 51 when President Obama was running, there were only 58 on Inauguration Day. There haven’t been 59 since 1979. It was a big loss, we’ve got to learn some lessons from it, but we can’t have that big a margin and walk around with our tails between our legs. We have to figure out a way to govern like we got 59."

Calling the election a "dark moment" in a historically lengthy legislative debate, Axelrod ultimately came to view the Brown win — which denied the Democratic Party a supermajority of 60 caucusing senators — as a positive development for the president. The parallel he drew was to the 2008 Democratic New Hampshire primary, when the Obama campaign (along with much of the political world) believed the then-senator would coast to victory, only to be confronted with a harsh and dispiriting dose of reality.

"It’s an analogy I used the other day," Axelrod said. "I always believed in the presidential race they just didn’t want to shut the race down because they liked Obama, they thought he had potential. But he was new. He was four years out of the State Senate and they weren’t prepared to hand him an early knockout. They wanted him to go through the entire battle, and they wanted to judge him based on how he performed on that long hard road.

"And actually, with Massachusetts, I think people wanted to see this debate go on for a while and they wanted to see our suppositions tested and retested. But what Massachusetts did at the end of the day was that it persuaded people on our side of the fight not to make the perfect the enemy of the good. And it really rallied our base behind the president’s proposal."

If Brown’s election was the legislative equivalent of the New Hampshire Democratic primary, then signing health care into law would logically be cast as the November election. But Axelrod insisted that the signing of health care into law was actually more significant for him than seeing Obama win the White House. It’s the difference between promising change and achieving it.

"This was one of the great days," he said. "The spirit in that room was phenomenal. A guy stopped me on the street today and he had tears in his eyes. He said I just want you to know my father died when he was 63. And we were actually relieved. He was very sick. But we were afraid we were going to go bankrupt because he had no health insurance. He said Franklin Roosevelt was my father’s hero and I want you to tell the president he is now mine."

Axelrod: Health Care Passed Because GOP Let Down Its Guard After Massachusetts

For all the political and economic uncertainties about health reform, at least one thing seems clear: The bill that President Obama signed on Tuesday is the federal government’s biggest attack on economic inequality since inequality began rising more than three decades ago.

Over most of that period, government policy and market forces have been moving in the same direction, both increasing inequality. The pretax incomes of the wealthy have soared since the late 1970s, while their tax rates have fallen more than rates for the middle class and poor.

Nearly every major aspect of the health bill pushes in the other direction. This fact helps explain why Mr. Obama was willing to spend so much political capital on the issue, even though it did not appear to be his top priority as a presidential candidate. Beyond the health reform’s effect on the medical system, it is the centerpiece of his deliberate effort to end what historians have called the age of Reagan.

Speaking to an ebullient audience of Democratic legislators and White House aides at the bill-signing ceremony on Tuesday, Mr. Obama claimed that health reform would “mark a new season in America.” He added, “We have now just enshrined, as soon as I sign this bill, the core principle that everybody should have some basic security when it comes to their health care.”

The bill is the most sweeping piece of federal legislation since Medicare was passed in 1965. It aims to smooth out one of the roughest edges in American society — the inability of many people to afford medical care after they lose a job or get sick. And it would do so in large measure by taxing the rich.

A big chunk of the money to pay for the bill comes from lifting payroll taxes on households making more than $250,000. On average, the annual tax bill for households making more than $1 million a year will rise by $46,000 in 2013, according to the Tax Policy Center, a Washington research group. Another major piece of financing would cut Medicare subsidies for private insurers, ultimately affecting their executives and shareholders.

The benefits, meanwhile, flow mostly to households making less than four times the poverty level — $88,200 for a family of four people. Those without insurance in this group will become eligible to receive subsidies or to join Medicaid. (Many of the poor are already covered by Medicaid.) Insurance costs are also likely to drop for higher-income workers at small companies. CONTINUED

Economic Scene – In Health Bill, Obama Attacks Wealth Inequality – NYTimes.com