Thanks Mitt!

Watch as former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, who’ll be seeking the Republican presidential nomination in 2012, explains how proud he is of Massachusetts’ universal health care law, a law then-governor Romney helped craft and signed into law:


It’s worth noting that the health care reform bill passed into law by Congressional Democrats during the last session of Congress (a plan Romney himself has been critical of) was based in large part on the health care reform plan enacted in Massachusetts, so instead of calling it “Obamacare,” perhaps we should really refer to it as “Romneycare.”

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4 thoughts on “Thanks Mitt!

  1. One thing I like about Mitt is that if you disagree with him today, just wait he will change his mind in a few days. No politician in history has been on all sides of every issue like mitt.

  2. Should we simply ignore the fact that state and federal involvement in such things is very different in terms of Constitutional limitations? Setting aside the Constitutional (which so many are wont to do when it might hinder their agenda) though there are similarities, there are many important differences between the Massachusetts plan and the Federal one. For starters, Massachusetts was a compromise between a Republican Governor and their Democrat-controlled Legislature while the Federal plan which was all the Democrats’. Also of interest, in a recent interview, Romney mentioned – with surprise – that through the federal debate on it’s health care reform, not a single Democrat called him to find out what sort of things were working and what weren’t in Massachusetts. Seems a stretch to tag “Obamacare” as “Romneycare” when they never actually talked to him about what they were doing.

    That said, this is how health care problems should addressed – with states creating pilot programs experimenting to work out what works and what doesn’t. Our federal government with all it’s bureaucracy and interest groups rarely get’s effective & non-wasteful implementation done when it starts out with the best plans.

    Finally – going on 5 years in, how is the Massachusetts plan working? The goal was universal coverage. Failed pretty miserably there. About half to two-thirds of those uninsured before the plan, remain so after. Other sources say the uninsured rate went from about 6% or 5.4% to about 4%. While there’s certainly a silver lining – that about 200,000 people now have health insurance is an improvement. But with as many as half a million still without – and given the costs to pay for/coerce/force them to get coverage, is that an acceptable result given the cost? And the cost…oh the cost. It’s been about 10% over budget every year. The ten year projection is that it will cost $2 Billion more than planned. If the feds take away the $100 million a year in medaid money they were counting on, and the numbers really get ugly.

  3. Couple things. !. Lets not pretend that the dems jammed “obamacare” down the republicans throats. It took 14 months because Obama was so desperate to make it a bi partisan proposal, that it perpetually got watered down. The republicans strategy was anything obama does is bad and refused to work with him or any democrats. There was no changing their minds no matter how many concessions they made. Its that simple.

    Do you not think that they talked to anyone else in MA? Mitt is far from a rocket scientist. I am sure they could find hundreds of people more informed on the pros and cons of the MA health care system than Mitt himself.

  4. Locke,

    You started out by explaining that there are constitutonal differences between state and federal attempts to handle such things, and then give no examples.

    If you’re going to set aside these differences throughout the rest of your argument one wonders why you brought it up in the first place.

    Also, have you ever read the text of HR 676, the Expanded and Improved Medicare for All Act? It’s only 30 pages long.

    http://www.pnhp.org/sites/default/files/docs/2011/HR676-Feb-11-2011.pdf

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