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Orrin Hatch, who co-sponsored individual mandate bill in 1993, introduces measure to declare it unconstitutional.

POLITICO’s The Pulse reports that Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) — who had proudly co-sponsored a 1993 bill that required everyone to purchase health insurance coverage — will introduce a measure to repeal the individual mandate. The individual mandate creates incentives for otherwise healthy Americans to purchase insurance and lowers premiums. Were Hatch’s plan adopted, healthy Americans would avoid buying coverage and insurance plans would be dominated by sicker people. Premiums would increase, severely disadvantaging the millions of Americans with chronic conditions (who actually use care). When ThinkProgress asked Hatch spokesperson Antonia Ferrier if the Senator was concerned about increasing costs, she said:

“That might be the concerns of some, our concern is about the constitutional questions about it.” “You keep going back to premiums. What I’m talking to you about is a very fundamental American concept of liberty here. We believe we can lower premiums in an entirely different way.”

According to a study by MIT economist Jonathan Gruber, “a plan without mandates, broadly resembling the Obama plan, would cover 23 million of those currently uninsured, at a taxpayer cost of $102 billion per year. An otherwise identical plan with mandates would cover 45 million of the uninsured — essentially everyone — at a taxpayer cost of $124 billion.” As Paul Krugman concludes, a plan without mandates would cost $4,400 per newly insured person, the plan with mandates only $2,700.

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