While Blogger was down, Mitt Romney gave a "major" address trying to explain away the millstone of Romneycare. The reviews were...not good It was a sincere, intelligent, cogent, informed political disaster.
The essence of Romney’s position is: I stand by my successful healthcare plan in Massachusetts, but ObamaCare is a disaster because it does all of the things that RomneyCare does, just on a national level. So, if I am elected president I will give waivers to states so they can repeat my mistakes if they want to, or, if they are smart, they will reject both my approach and Obama’s.
I don’t think it will work.
It’s hard to hate Obamacare and love Romneycare. For example, Romney continued to defend the individual mandate — the most despised part of Obamacare — as right for Massachusetts but wrong for the country.
Four years after reform, Massachusetts still has the highest health-insurance premiums in the country. For small employers, the rise is about 14 percent beyond those in the rest of the nation.
And it’s increasingly difficult to get a doctor’s appointment. A recent survey by the Massachusetts Medical Society reveals that fewer than half of the state’s primary-care practices are accepting new patients, and the average wait time to get an appointment with an internist is 48 days. The result: The use of hospital emergency rooms in Massachusetts by people seeking routine care has increased. This was another problem Romneycare was supposed to fix.
The five-point plan that Governor Romney outlined to structure the health-reform initiative he would undertake as president is sound and based upon solid principles. But it’s hard to see how voters will give him a chance unless he admits that the health plan he developed for Massachusetts went seriously wrong.
He was emphatic about calling for repeal of Obamacare and said he will issue an executive order paving the way for the states to get a waiver from the health-overhaul law while Congress works to repeal it.
But you can’t use an executive order to wipe out two massive new federal entitlement programs, $550 billion in new and higher taxes, a vast expansion of Medicaid, and federal mandates on individuals, businesses, and the states. Waivers are not a solution.
Actually, Romney's real problem with Romneycare was that he willingly worked to pass it in the first place. It really doesn't matter how well he can set out the differences between government run health care in Massachusetts versus the national model.
Health care reform was one of many top-down reform projects (cap&trade is another) originating from the Left, which claimed that there was intolerable injustice in America due to the inequalities in the health care system. To believe that the system needed reform was to believe that America's health care was "broken," that 40 million+ people went without health insurance (the real number was a fraction of this), and that only a top-down approach could solve every problem at once, and lower costs, too. To say all that is to wonder at the mentality - driven by "facts and data," of course - that could believe such a thing.
A true conservative response would be John Boehner's "Hell No!" Joe Wilson's "You Lie!" or Sarah Palin's "Death Panels." If you want to kick it up a notch, you follow the Paul Ryan approach and get out a calculator. Mitt Romney's response? "Hey, let's work together to solve this problem that doesn't really exist, but which gets hammered on in the media a lot!" In other words, he fell for the commonest form of political hype out there: that there is some injustice out there that only massive expansion of government can alleviate. I keep hearing about how Romney is this sophisticated businessman, but politically he's no different than Chuck Schumer or Dick Durbin. And now we have to nominate him as the GOP presidential nominee? No way.
This doesn't let the other "first tier" candidates off the hook. The reason they are "first tier" is because the media has annointed them as such. But the only way a Republican is considered electable in the media is if he first demonstrates his fealty towards the bi-partisan party of government. Tim Pawlenty is having to explain away his early support for cap & trade, but what he should really be explaining is why he fell for the global warming hoax in the first place. Newt Gingrich might have led the 1994 Revolution, but he also has a history of spinning grand schemes, especially in the "Green" arena. Again, this is a small government conservative?
We don't need more technocrats or moderates looking to comprehensively "reform" this or that area of the economy, and then are dubbed the "adults in the room" because they are willing to enable the Left's statist dreams. We need practical people who don't get caught up in a lot of media hype over the Left's latest "injustice."
