“I think what the role of the federal government is to provide opportunity for everyone to get what they want, to live their dreams and not to dictate what everybody should have,” he said.
And he explained why, which is even when certain things are mandated by the federal government, they often don’t work and added it simply is “not the American way of doing things.”
“You can’t force every American to do something they don’t want to do,” Santorum explained. “You can force people to be in Social Security, yet I think it’s only about 96 percent of Americans that are in Social Security. There are lots of mandates we put on people and they don’t obey. That’s wrong. That’s not the American way of doing things. The American way of doing things is getting people to live their dreams to make their choices.” Rick Santorum 1994 senatorial debate
How anyone can interpret that to mean individual mandates is beyond my level of comprehension. I only have a high school diploma though, so maybe I’m not educated enough to twist words around to mean something opposite than what was said.