Jon Stewart On Obamacare: Why Not Postpone the Individual Mandate [Video]

Stewart talks Obamacare with Sebelius.

The Obamacare individual mandate came under scrutiny from Jon Stewart in a Daily Show interview with Kathleen Sebelius, the US Secretary of Health and Human Services. After the interview last night, an apparently exasperated Stewart even wondered out loud if she was lying to him.

HHS is the federal agency in charge of overseeing Obamacare. In the latter part of the Sebelius discussion, Stewart noted that he felt uncomfortable defending a program that has a “level of incompetence that’s larger than what it should be.”

That was an interesting admission in that Comedy Central viewers know that Stewart generally is a strong Obama administration supporter and has been regularly blasting the GOP in “crazytown” in recent episodes for the government shutdown. However, he didn’t give Sebelius a pass in the interview (see embed) and among other things raised the same criticism Republicans have about the employer mandate vs. the individual mandate. During the interview, Secretary Sebelius responded with what appeared to be canned, rehearsed answers that weren’t fully responsive to his questioning.

For openers, Stewart asked her about healthcare.gov glitches. “We’re going to do a challenge,” Stewart quipped. “I’m going to try and download every movie ever made, and you are going to try to sign up for Obamacare — and we’ll see which happens first and we’ll see which happens first.”

The secretary said that things are getting better on the website but admitted that she had no idea how many people have fully enrolled in Obamacare through the health exchanges.

The interview primarily centered on the individual mandate.

Stewart asked her repeatedly without getting a satisfactory answer why big business got a postponement of the employer mandate, but American consumers got no such break on the individual mandate, especially someone who is satisfied with his/her insurance plan and who doesn’t want Obamacare.

Said Stewart: “If I’m an individual that doesn’t want it, it would be hard for me to look at a big business getting a waiver and not having to do it and me having to. Because I would think… because I don’t have have a lobbying group… Because I would feel like… like you are favoring big business because they lobbied you to delay it because they didn’t want to do it this year, but you’re not allowing individuals that same courtesy.”

Sebelius suggested that any consumer who declines Obamacare can just “pay a fine.”

Instead of a “market-based solution,” Stewart reaffirmed his support of a single payer, completely government run insurance mechanism which US Sen. Harry Reid (D – Nev.), the majority leader, previously admitted was the end game. The 2010 election of Scott Brown to the US Senate prevented the Democrats from making any further changes, however, to the version of the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a., Obamacare, that already passed the Senate on Christmas Eve 2009.

Single payer advocates may or may not be aware of the rationing and treatment delays, for example, in the British National Health Service and in a similar setup in Canada, however.