Heidi Heitkamp Thinks Obamacare’s Tax “Isn’t Severe Enough”

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Written By:
Rob Port

Oct 2, 2012
12:18pm

Crossroads GPS has released a new ad in North Dakota’s Senate race, this time hitting Heitkamp on comments she made about Obamacare back in July, saying specifically that she didn’t think the tax penalties in the law for uninsured people were severe enough:

The quote the ad is referring to is from a Fargo Forum report stemming from a meeting Heitkamp had with that paper’s editorial board. Here’s what was reported:

Heitkamp said the penalty for not having health insurance isn’t severe enough to incentivize people to get insurance, so it won’t work to meet the goal of reducing costs.

“It’s not going to add to the ranks of the people insured,” Heitkamp said. “You need to deal with making health care costs more affordable.”

That’s bad for a candidate who hopes to be elected by North Dakotans who hate this law. But what makes Heitkamp even worse is that, in the same meeting, she also tried to claim that she doesn’t like Obamacare’s health insurance mandate at all:

“I’ve never liked the mandate – in part because of where it came from,” Heitkamp said referring to the mandate’s origins as a proposal offered by a Republican think tank during the health care debate of the 1990s.

“It presupposes people don’t buy health insurance because they don’t want to,” Heitkamp said. “People don’t buy health insurance because they can’t afford it.”

So Heitkamp thinks the problem with health insurance is affordability – she’s right as far as that goes – but she also thinks part of the solution is sky-high taxes on people who can’t or won’t buy it?

That’s some very muddled policy coming from this liberal Senate candidate. You don’t promote affordability by forcing people to by something. You promote affordability by making it easier to supply demand. Which is the exact opposite of what Obamacare, with all its taxes and red tape, does.