SEVENTY-THREE PAGES OF EMAILS from former Gov. Romney have been disclosed by the Wall Street Journal. “We can’t make this work without an individual mandate,” Mark Maremont reports one of Romney’s aides saying, in what should be a blockbuster story.
The individual mandate is something that rubs me wrong, but the health care experts argue it’s necessary. The current health care law, ACA, just doesn’t have enough consumer protections and the power remains with private insurance. Get more options, Medicare for all or a public option, then we can talk about a mandate. The Supreme Court will weigh in later this month on the matter and then the campaign will be off and running no matter what they decide.
The real tragedy in all this is what might happen if Mitt was allowed to be Mitt. He may be personally against women’s individual freedoms, but in Massachusetts he fought to protect them. Same goes for gay rights, though only up to a point, after all he is a Republican. There’s a reason right wingers aren’t sure about Mitt Romney and these emails give a hint as to why. That Romney can’t brag about Romneycare is also sad. Any politician worth his or her salt knows our country needs national health care.
Unfortunately, the moment Mitt Romney embraced Paul Ryan’s austerity plan he pretty much stepped in a trap that hobbles him and competes with Pres. Obama’s vulnerability against the global markets, including China’s slowdown, something neither can move around.
But as Pres. Clinton illustrated last night, tying Mitt Romney to austerity through the Ryan plan, as the world economic markets shudder, is a way to make it clear to voters that there is a choice in November, with the option of Romney equating to the same type of austerity that has plunged Britain into a double-dip recession.
It also might have the added impact of backing Pres. Obama off any further Republicanism he’s toying with going forward. That’s the overly optimistic viewpoint.
From my perspective, Romneycare and its cousin Obamacare are the Republican plan. Criticizing it now makes them look like they have no plan at all. That might be a more honest position than Romnobamacare, but it doesn’t make the GOP look any better.
Romneycare and Obamacare are exactly what Hillary Clinton proposed in 1993 and during her 2008 Presidential Campaign. Romneycare, Obamacare and Hillarycare are three peas in the same pod. Universall Healthcare managed by private insurance companies and the requirement of an individual mandate,
bwah hah hah hah!…no, really…one of your funniest!
Not exactly RAJ~ Romney care was the Republican response to Clinton’s healthcare plan put out by the AEI.
Doesn’t all this really go back to Nixon vs. Teddy Kennedy?
I blame Lincoln. If he’d just thrown the Civil War, we wouldn’t have nearly so many conservatives in this country.
The GOP really does seem to either actually or willfully misunderstand how insurance works. It had Ruth Bader Ginsberg scratching her head. The idea that you need a broad based pool of money to finance health care that is often used by a minority of people is not a new idea. The only suggestion I’ve heard the GOP come up with recently is to allow a race to the bottom across state lines and have “high-risk pools” for really sick people. It’s absurd on its face and would not take long to collapse under its own weight
They did the sales across the state lines here in GA and they had no takers. The GOP was fully of excuses as to why no one was doing it. The GOP ignorance is astounding because first of all–almost all the ppos and Hmos are set up by area. It’s very hard to buy insurance from another state. Are you going ot travel all teh way to NY every time you need a doctor? Well, the GOP seems to think so. Secondly the only kind of insurance that is feasible to “sell across state lines” is the most expensive kind of insurance–indemnity insurance. So basically you could sell expensive indemnity insurance or high deductible indemnity insurance aka “junk insurance” across state lines but the first is insurance that very few can afford and the second is insurance that no one wants. So anohter GOP idea fails. What else is hew?
The 1993 plan had small groups forming “purchasing pools.” This was intended to be a way to hold down cost, the idea being that it’s cheaper per capita to administer a large plan. All of these plans had employer and employee mandates. LL is right, the AEI didn’t like the employer mandate so it responded with an idea similar to what we ended up with. The ACA does have an employer mandate for large employers as well as the indiv mandate. The 80-20/85-15 rebate rule is intended to squeeze insurance companies in the hope that they will squeeze savings out of the providers and their own overhead.
That’s great, Taylor. It is eerily reminiscent, isn’t it? And the AMA is eating its words and probably regreting what it did. And I think Kennedy regreted not doing his part to close the deal. I guess the fear of socialism on the right and the impression on the left that single-payer is the only solution has been dogging us for a long time. Meanwhile, we pay more and more and get sicker and sicker.
Exactly, Ga6thDem. I think it’s the junky, high-deductible kind they are peddling. Not much of a solution.