Yes, Back in 1993 Hillary Rodham Clinton Argued That the Democratic Plan for an Employer Mandate Was Fairer than the Republican Plan for an Individual Mandate. Why Do You Ask?

On the case is Igor Volsky:

Igor Volsky: The Campaign Begins: Media Seizes On Hillary’s Health Care Statements From Two Decades Ago: “In a speech to Democrats in 1993,

Hillary Clinton characterized the individual mandate to purchase coverage–then a centerpiece of the [Heritage Foundation’s and the] GOP’s counter-proposal–as a “much harder sell” than… [requiring] employers to provide coverage to their employees. “That is politically and substantively a much harder sell than the one we’ve got,” Clinton said. “Because not only will you be saying that the individual bears the full responsibility; you will be sending shock waves through the currently insured population that if there is no requirement that employers continue to insure, then they, too, may bear the individual responsibility.”

An individual mandate was, she argued, both less fair than an employer mandate–it would be hard to finance an adequate subsidy pool to help the working poor finance insurance–and, if there were an adequate subsidy pool, be more disruptive, causing pointless churn as employers dropped coverage in order to push their employees into the exchanges.

And guess what? There is and will be some such pointless churn.

Igor continues:

The administration’s 1993 health care proposal, Health Security Act, relied heavily on an employer mandate, but it also included an individual responsibility component. “In accordance with this Act, each eligible individual (other than a Medicare-eligible individual) must enroll in an applicable health plan for the individual, and must pay any premium required, consistent with this Act, with respect to such enrollment,” §1002 (a) states. Individuals who did not enroll in a plan would have been auto-enrolled in insurance once they sought health care services….

Former Clinton administration officials who worked closely with administration in drafting the proposal explained that the Clintons strongly disagreed with the GOP’ push to require individuals to pay for all of their health care costs and sought to build on the existing health care system and bolster the role of the employer in providing coverage. As Hillary Clinton explained before the Committee, the administration feared that without a companion employer requirement, “the numbers of people who currently are insured through their employment will decrease, because there will no longer be any reason for many employers who have struggled to ensure their workers.”

“People remember the employer mandate in the Clinton plan, but it had both,” Judy Feder, a Georgetown professor who helped craft the Clinton plan, told ThinkProgress. “Hillary Clinton has been on this for years.”
The former first lady was also prescient about the politics of the individual requirement. Public opinion polls from the time showed that most Americans believed that employers should contribute to their employees’ health care coverage, leading Republican leadership to quickly sour on their own alternative. As Sen. Bob Dole admitted on Meet The Press, the “individual mandates aren’t going to pass.” “I see about three votes for individual mandates on the Finance Committee.”