Did you know that the same individual mandate that Senate Republicans have been recently attacking in the proposed health care reform legislation was initially proposed by Republican lawmakers as a part of an alternate bill during Clinton’s failed health care reform initiative in 1993? Neither did I.

Digging around on this, I found an article from the American Prospect by Paul Starr that was written just after the collapse of that initiative. He notes that

The collapse of health care reform in the first two years of the Clinton administration will go down as one of the great lost political opportunities in American history. It is a story of compromises that never happened, of deals that were never closed, of Republicans, moderate Democrats, and key interest groups that backpedaled from proposals they themselves had earlier co-sponsored or endorsed.

It is also a story of strategic miscalculation on the part of the president and those of us who advised him. In 1993, 23 Republican senators, including then-Minority Leader Robert Dole, cosponsored a bill introduced by Senator John Chafee that sought to achieve universal coverage through a mandate that is, a mandate on individuals to buy insurance. Nearly every major health care interest group had endorsed substantial reforms—grandiose ones, in fact. The American Medical Association (AMA) and Health Insurance Association of America (HIAA), the two great, historic bastions of opposition to compulsory health insurance, both went on record in support of an employer mandate and universal coverage. Even the U.S. Chamber of Commerce endorsed an employer mandate, as did many large corporations. Other groups came out variously for reform options that ran along a spectrum from Canadian-style, single-payer programs on the left to managed competition and medical savings accounts and radical changes in tax policy on the right. Under the circumstances, it was easy to believe the country was ready for substantial reform and that a market-oriented, consumer-choice approach to universal coverage, positioned in the center, could become a platform for consensus.

It was easy to believe, but it turned out to be wrong.

Read the whole thing if for no other reason then to be reminded that the seeds of political nihilism were sown far earlier than you may want to imagine.