Former DNC Chairman Howard Dean has never been a fan of the individual mandate for insurance coverage, both on policy and political grounds. And once Senate negotiators removed any hope of a public option for insurance coverage from the final health care reform package, he became much more outspoken in his criticism.
The logic, simply put, was that there were other avenues for providing health care coverage to large swaths of the population without forcing them to sign up with private insurers. Dean would know -- he expanded health care coverage for kids without an individual mandate while serving as governor of Vermont.
On Friday, the former DNC chair took his skepticism with the individual mandate to a different, more provocative level. Appearing on MSNBC, Dean predicted that the policy will be removed from the legislation by the time much of the reform is implemented in 2014.
His comments come just days after a Virginia judge ruled that a constitutional challenge to the provision can go forward -- something that Dean took into his calculations. But the case he made was also based on the belief that a mandate will never achieve broad popular support, something that appears relatively true at this early juncture.
