“This is not real reform,” said Howard Dean of Obamacare’s mandate in December 2009. “You’re going to be forced to buy health insurance from a company that’s going to take on average 27 percent of your money so they can pay CEOs 20 million dollars a year…and there’s no choice about that. If you don’t buy that insurance, you’re going to get a fine. This is a bill that was fundamentally written by staffers who are friendly to the insurance industry, [endorsed] by Senators who take a lot of money from the insurance industry, and it’s not health care reform. And I think it’s too bad that it should come to this…I’d kill the bill entirely.”

Dean, to his great credit, has been consistent all along in his criticism of the mandate. Not so for President Obama, who on the campaign trail in 2008 ridiculed Hillary Clinton’s support of the mandate. “I don’t think the problem is that people don’t want health insurance,” he told Ellen DeGeneres in 2008, “it’s that they can’t afford it…if things were that easy, I could mandate everybody to buy a house, and that would solve the problem of homelessness. It doesn’t.” As President Obama’s staffers began pushing for a mandate, Ron Suskind reports, Obama expressed concern about Constitutional challenges to the provision. As we know now, he was right to have done so.