RomneyCare will hang around Mitt Romney’s neck like a huge leaded weight. Too bad because he actually would have been a much stronger opponent of Obama’s in 2008 then McCain was.
h/t weasel zippers
by Philip Klein
Mitt Romney announced on Monday that he was forming an exploratory committee to run for president, which raised eyebrows because the news closely coincided with today’s fifth anniversary of the passage of his signature legislation as governor of Massachusetts, the state’s health care law. Given that his signing of the measure promises to dominate the Republican presidential primaries, I thought I’d review the top five failed defenses of the law that have been offered by Romney and his supporters, in no particular order.
The Massachusetts plan was a free market approach, but ObamaCare is a government takeover:
In December 2009, when the so-called “public option” went down in flames in the U.S. Senate, so too did Romney’s ability to distinguish the structure of his plan from President Obama’s in any meaningful way.
Both plans force individuals to purchase insurance under the threat of a penalty, expand Medicaid, and provide subsidies for individuals to purchase government-designed insurance policies on a government run exchange.
One of the main architects of the Massachusetts plan, MIT economist Jonathan Gruber, went on to be a paid consultant for Obama and a booster of his health care plan. He recently told the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin that Romney’s plan “gave birth” to ObamaCare.
When it comes to the main feature that both plans have in common – the individual mandate – it’s clear that Democrats adopted language during the health care debate that was quite similar to Romney’s.
In an April 2006 Wall Street Journal op-ed, Romney wrote:
Some of my libertarian friends balk at what looks like an individual mandate. But remember, someone has to pay for the health care that must, by law, be provided: Either the individual pays or the taxpayers pay. A free ride on government is not libertarian.
During a January 2008 GOP presidential debate on ABC, Romney dug in, explaining:
Here’s my view: If somebody — if somebody can afford insurance and decides not to buy it, and then they get sick, they ought to pay their own way, as opposed to expect the government to pay their way.
And that’s an American principle. That’s a principle of personal responsibility.
The idea of the mandate being a response to the free rider problem and a matter of personal responsibility has been central to Democratic framing of the individual mandate. In fact, in the law itself, the mandate is called the “individual responsibility requirement.”
Read the rest– The top five failed defenses of RomneyCare
