On Thursday, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) introduced two separate measures to repeal “the unconstitutional individual mandate and the job-killing employer mandate, the most egregious elements of this devastating health law.” Now, in a new interview with the National Review the conservative senator who had once supported the individual requirement to stop health reform in 1993, explains his strategy of targeting the individual requirement:

“By attacking the mandates, we take away the Democrats’ arguments against our calls for full repeal, where they say we’d take away protections for people with preexisting conditions,” Hatch explains. “ Focusing on the mandates enables us to shine a light on the most unconstitutional aspects of this lousy piece of legislation. It compels them to talk specifics. Let’s remember that these mandates are the central tenets of Obamacare. Gut them and the law falls apart.” [...]

“President Obama, if reelected, will try to move the country to a single-payer system. That’s my theory, at least,” he says. “They know this system isn’t going to work, so they’ll be ready to say, ‘Why don’t we let thegovernment take care of it, and we won’t tax anybody.’ That’s what they want to see happen. And if that happens, it’ll be over.” What’ll be over, senator? “The greatest country in the world,” he says. “We’ll lose our status as the greatest.”

The single-payer paranoia aside, all of this makes very little sense. By revoking the mandate, Hatch is eliminating the incentive for younger and healthier individuals to purchase coverage and is actually encouraging people to buy insurance only when they become sick. Under these circumstances, the pool of applicants will eventually become weighed down with sick people, increasing costs for everyone and actually forcing healthier people out of the pool. The result is a death spiral in which coverage becomes increasingly expensive and undoes all the consumer protections that Hatch is touting — i.e. protections for people with preexisting conditions. And it’s these increasing costs that Hatch is not very concerned about. As his staffer explained to me on Thursday, “[cost] might be the concerns of some, our concern is about the constitutional questions about it.”

A new Kaiser Family Foundation survey from March and early April finds that “people who purchase health insurance on their own were faced with premium increases averaging 20 percent when they last sought to renew their coverage“:

While some people switched to less expensive plans that offered less generous coverage, and others negotiated lower prices than their insurers initially requested, the people surveyed still reported an average increase of 13 percent on their health insurance costs….The findings also underscore the challenges that will continue to be faced by people in the individual market until changes under the new health care law go into effect in 2014, Mr. Altman said. About 14 million people under the age of 65 purchase their coverage in the individual market, according to Kaiser.

Look:

All of this is just a long way of proving that despite the GOP’s feigned horror about ‘losing the coverage you like’ under the health law, insurers change plans all the time, particularly in the individual market, where sicker and more expensive beneficiaries often find themselves subject to outrageous cost increases. Reform should put a stop to most of this behavior by 2014 and if a plan loses its so-called ‘grandfathered’ status, beneficiaries will have regulated coverage options through the exchanges. Without reform, you couldn’t keep the health care plan you like because, as we see, some combination of rising health care costs and insurer self interest will lead the issuer to increase your premiums or jack up your deductibles.

The other important point is that all of these increases are happening in the individual market, which is where we will all be if Republicans repeal the health care law and “replace” it with tax credits and selling-across-sate lines provisions. Remember, their proposals would push Americans into individual plans without significantly regulating that market. If 61% of Americans with individual policies already “say it is very or somewhat difficult for them to afford the cost of health care” and only 47% are confident “about their ability to pay for a major illness” with their individual policies, just imagine what people would face with a static tax credit and a deregulated insurance market.

A new study of the media’s coverage of health reform from June 2009 through March 2010 suggests that the press has done little to inform the public about the law and may have contributed to the mass confusion and opposition that exists towards the policy:

– Health care coverage was the No. 1 story in the mainstream press from June 2009 through March 2010.

– The debate centered more on politics than the workings of the health care system. Fully 41% of health care coverage focused on the tactics and strategy of the debate while various reform proposals filled another 23%. But only 9% of the coverage focused on a core issue — how our health care system currently functions, what works and what doesn’t.

– Opponents of health care legislation won the message war. A Nexis search of key terms in the health care debate finds that opponents’ terms appeared almost twice as often (about 18,000 times) as supporters’ top terms (about 11,000). In short, the opponents’ attacks on government-run health care resonated more widely than the supporters’ attacks on the insurance industry.

None of this is terribly surprising, of course. The media covered the politics of health care — the death panels and ‘government takeover’ memes — because they were more sensationalistic and popular than the boring complexities of how the public option could compete with private plans or whether the individual mandate penalty should be structured as a percentage or a flat fee. The truth is, blogs (including this one) also fell into the trap of chasing the August-themed town hall mania, but I would argue that the bloggers (including this one) did it better than the mainstream press by actually deconstructing the charges and explaining why they’re wrong. The mainstream press too often fell into the he-said/she-said frame, allowing disingenuous arguments to go unchecked.

But the larger point here is that the health coverage in the far more influential mainstream press did very little to serve the public interest and as the debate progressed, Americans became more, not less, confused about the policy. “A solid majority of Americans consistently said the health care debate was hard to understand — a number that increased from 63% in July 2009 to 69% in December 2009, according to surveys from the Pew Research Center for the People & Press.”

Republicans successfully exploited the media’s desire for easy to understand left/right talking points coverage and flooded the airwaves with all kinds of attacks, forcing Democrats to respond and the media to amplify. For instance, during my appearances on cable news shows, the producers would ask me for “my take” on the issue in a pre-show interview and input the answers into the computer without ever interrogating my responses. The more confrontational I became, the more praise I received. During one particularly heated segment, the producer came into my ear and told me what a good job I’ve done ‘shouting down’ my conservative opponent. The veracity of my responses or the informational value of the segment was completely irrelevant. It was the back and forth that mattered most.

That said, it’s difficult to gauge what effect all this had on public opinion or acceptance of the health care bill. My guess is Americans saw their leaders screaming at each other and concluded that the truth was somewhere in the middle. The administration will now try to use the lull in health care stories to educate the public about the specifics of the bill. But my hunch is that given the media’s recent preoccupation with detailing how the bill falls short of political expectations rather than covering the implementation challenges (the process of actually enforcing all of the new regulatory changes and coverage expansion), the public will be no more informed about reform until the law actually does what its name promises — improve access and lower costs.