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Posts Tagged ‘Romneycare’

Mitt Romney declares 2012 Candidacy

by Phantom Ace ( 4 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, Democratic Party, Economy, Elections 2012, George W. Bush, Headlines, Progressives, Republican Party at June 2nd, 2011 - 3:04 pm

Liberal Rockefeller Republican Mitt Romney has declared his bid for the 2012 GOP nomination. He starts off with 2 albatrosses around his neck. Romneycare and his years at Bain Capital will be used against him. He is not liked by the Conservative base and many will do all to stop him.

When Mitt Romney launches his second presidential campaign Thursday on a rolling New Hampshire hayfield, notably absent will be a number of endorsers, donors and advisers from his 2008 bid who, for personal and professional reasons, have not committed to his 2012 effort.

After running what was widely considered an unfocused and bloated campaign in 2008, the former Massachusetts governor is returning to the presidential sweepstakes with a more tightly knit team. But his new world isn’t entirely by design: Some of the people who surrounded him in 2008 said they have begged off Romney 2.0 because, as much as they like and respect him, they are not convinced he can survive the Republican primary and beat President Obama.

Barack Hussein Obama is salivating the prospect of  Romney as his opponent. Romney made money at Bain Capital by buying out money making small and medium businesses. Then he would outsource the job and sell the companies for a profit. He is responsible for the loss of jobs in Pennsylvania, Ohio and north Carolina. Should he be the 2012 GOP nominee, the Republicans can write off those 3 states as well as Florida.

Romney also has a soft spot for Islam and has ties to the House of Saud. He would be a continuation of the failed Bush style Republicanism. Republicans can do batter than this clown.

Is This Romney’s ‘Come to Jesus’ Moment?

by Deplorable Macker ( 53 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, Elections 2012, Healthcare, Mitt Romney, Republican Party at May 12th, 2011 - 2:00 pm

I’ve stated on several occasions here that my big beef versus former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney is that he signed into law the model for what is now Обамаcare:

Think about how powerful Romneycare has been. In 2008 — when Обама was running for president and Ted Kennedy was towering over the Senate — nearly 70 percent of Massachusetts voters supported the plan. A mere 22 percent of right-wing holdouts opposed it.
After all, this is Massachusetts, where “universal health care” is a political mantra, like “collective bargaining rights” or “indicted House member.”
But after five years of actually experiencing this new universe, even the Kennedy Democrats have had enough. A new Suffolk University poll showed that nearly half of Massachusetts voters say the law isn’t helping, while just 38 percent say it is. As Michael Cannon at the Cato Institute pointed out, Romneycare is almost as unpopular here as Обамаcare is across America.

So, has Romney finally realized that he made a mistake in signing this into law in the Bay State? In May 11’s edition of USA TODAY, he writes the following:

…Unfortunately, with the passage of ОбамаCare last year, the president and the Congress took a wrong turn. ОбамаCare will lead to more spending, greater federal involvement in health care and negative effects on U.S. economic activity. The president definitely forgot the admonition to “do no harm.”
My plan is to harness the power of markets to drive positive change in health insurance and health care. And we can do so with state flexibility (unlike ОбамаCare’s top-down federal approach), no new taxes (as opposed to hundreds of billions of dollars of new taxes under ОбамаCare), and better consumer choice (as opposed to bureaucratic, government choice under ОбамаCare). This change of direction offers our best hope of preserving both innovation and value.
If I am elected president, I will issue on my first day in office an executive order paving the way for waivers from ОбамаCare for all 50 states. Subsequently, I will call on Congress to fully repeal ОбамаCare.

Better yet, a Congress totally in Republican hands can have said legislation waiting for his inaugural podium…and he could sign it during his address!
That said, Romney continues:

The reforms that I propose, which are based on the same philosophical tenets as the reforms I offered during my last presidential campaign in 2008, return power to the states, improve access by slowing health care cost increases, and make health insurance portable and flexible for today’s economy.

The big difference between his proposals three years ago and today is that Обамаcare is now the law of the land, and we have all seen what is in store for the USA…even before the full effect hits.
Even so, we must remain vigilant with Romney, since for the moment, he’s still the darling of the Mainstream Media.,,and we all know what that means.

Five failed defenses of RomneyCare

by Mojambo ( 231 Comments › )
Filed under Healthcare at April 12th, 2011 - 4:21 pm

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