HuffPo's Sam Stein has a new report today, that Rep. Dave Camp (R-Mich.), chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, is acknowledging the House leadership is giving up repealing health care reform, and claims that they will be focusing on repealing the individual mandate.
To be polite, that is bunkum.
Stein is usually one of the good examples of real reporting at HuffPo, but alas this is a typical mainstream media case of too much stenography of a what a politician says, and not enough actual background and investigative reporting.
As I have noted correctly before, there is zero chance that Republicans and the corporate wing of the Democrats will actually repeal just the individual mandate. And I don't believe the corporatist wing of the Supreme Court will do it either.
Just a reminder that the mandate is what AHIP and insurance companies want. It is the basis for their own preferred plan: make everybody buy their inherently overpriced and defective product.
Politically, the individual mandate was supposed to be the compromise that "sensible mainstream inside-the-beltway" proponents of health care reform had to agreed to, in return for which AHIP and others were not supposed to fight (too much) against much of the good stuff in the health reform bill with regards to guaranteed issue, some degree of community rating, a minimum percentage that is supposed to be spent on actual care (and not profit and overhead), and other oversight and regulations limiting their abuses. Of course that deal was supposed to also include the public option, to keep the insurance companies honest and ostensibly to provide them some real competition.