At the Value's Voters Summit last week, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee came out against the provision of the health-care reform act that precludes companies from excluding people with pre-existing conditions. Many have pointed out that this is one of the most popular provisions of the law and, in mocking it, Huckabee actually makes the case for the individual mandate. If you cover people with pre-existing conditions, you need a healthier populace in the insurance pool to cover the costs, and you need people to start paying premiums while they're still healthy, before they get sick and start costing money.
But more than that, this position ignores several pertinent facts about Huckabee's own history. If Huckabee were not wealthy, it's easy to see how he himself would struggle to qualify for affordable coverage on the individual market: He was obese and beginning to experience Type II diabetes and heart problems before he changed his lifestyle in the early 2000s. Not only that, but his own personal efforts to get healthy -- through weight loss and increased activity -- influenced his work as governor. He signed the state's SChip program -- ARKids -- into law, and also started several programs through various state agencies to encourage healthy living. Not only that, but he bragged about his efforts to make Arkansas healthier on the website of his exploratory committee when he ran for president in 2008.
You could try to argue that spending state money to encourage healthy outcomes and using the power of the government to regulate companies that help provide health care are entirely different things, but it's a specious argument. During Huckabee's tenure as governor, he sometimes showed that he believed he had the power to help people through policy. Since then, he's done everything he can to walk back from that belief. It's disappointing, and discouraging, that Republicans on the national stage work so hard to forget what it's like to actually govern with responsibility.
-- Monica Potts
