Trump: I Like The Obamacare Mandate

Thursday night, real estate mogul Donald Trump continued to expose his liberal colors as he expressed his support for the Obamacare mandate.

During the CNN town hall, Trump was asked why an insurance company would want to cover people with pre-existing conditions if there were no individual mandate.

“Well, I like the mandate,” Trump responded. “Ok, so here’s where I’m a little bit different–I don’t want people dying on the streets.”

While Trump advocated for opening competition among bidders and denied that he was in favor of a single-payer healthcare system, he called for taking care of the poor through a program that was similar to the “concept of Medicare,” which is a single-payer program.

Trump has smeared Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) as a “total liar” for saying he supports Obamacare. Yet Trump supports the Obamacare individual mandate, which is ironic because – as RedState’s streiff points out – this means that Trump is in agreement with Chief Justice John Roberts on the individual mandate. Trump has been blaming Cruz for Obamacare since he supported Roberts’s nomination.

The individual mandate is antithetical to the concept of freedom and ordered liberty. The mandate fundamentally transforms the relationship between the individual and government, as the government coerces the individual to purchase a particular service. As the late Justice Antonin Scalia pointed out during Obamacare’s oral arguments, “Everybody has to buy food sooner or later, so you define the market as food, therefore, everybody is in the market; therefore, you can make people buy broccoli.”

Trump will likely to try and weasel his way out of this by saying that he labeled Obamacare as “dead” in his answer, but he cannot squirm out of the fact that he likes the individual mandate and is essentially arguing for heavy government intervention in the healthcare sector.

“Well, I like the mandate.”

Donald Trump, admitting he agrees with Supreme Court Justice John Roberts’ disastrous reasoning for allowing Obamacare

As Jeffrey Anderson writes in The Weekly Standard, “Not since Mitt Romney has a prominent Republican officeholder or top-tier candidate for office expressed fondness for the individual mandate.” How did that work out for Romney?