THIS NEEDS TO BE REPEATED BY SENIOR DEMOCRATIC POLITICIANS

and all other outlets. I noted before that conservatives have a 2o year record of supporting an individual mandate for health care and now the AP has gotten around to pointing that out. Note the last sentence.

Obama health insurance requirement taken from GOP
Mar 27 05:19 PM US/Eastern
By RICARDO ALONSO-ZALDIVAR
Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) - Republicans were for President Barack Obama's requirement that Americans get health insurance before they were against it.

The obligation in the new health care law is a Republican idea that's been around at least two decades. It was once trumpeted as an alternative to Bill and Hillary Clinton's failed health care overhaul in the 1990s. These days, Republicans call it government overreach.

Mitt Romney, weighing another run for the GOP presidential nomination, signed such a requirement into law at the state level as Massachusetts governor in 2006. At the time, Romney defended it as "a personal responsibility principle" and Massachusetts' newest GOP senator, Scott Brown, backed it.

In the 1990s, the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, embraced an individual requirement. Not anymore.

"The idea of an individual mandate as an alternative to single-payer was a Republican idea," said health economist Mark Pauly of the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. In 1991, he published a paper that explained how a mandate could be combined with tax credits—two ideas that are now part of Obama's law. Pauly's paper was well-received—by the George H.W. Bush administration.

"It could have been the basis for a bipartisan compromise, but it wasn't," said Pauly. "Because the Democrats were in favor, the Republicans more or less had to be against it."