Posted on 10/11/2011 12:09:46 PM PDT by STARWISE
The Obama administration may have relied much more heavily on Romney’s Massachusetts healthcare legislation as a blueprint for Obamacare than was previously believed.
White House visitor logs obtained by NBC News revealed that three of Romney’s healthcare advisers had up to a dozen meetings with senior administration officials, including one in the Oval Office presided over by President Barack Obama.
“They really wanted to know how we can take that same approach we used in Massachusetts and turn that into a national model,” MIT economist and Romney healthcare adviser Jon Gruber told NBC.
What’s more, the records show Gruber was given a $380,000 contract in 2009 to help draft new legislation based on the Massachusetts healthcare law.
The White House tapped another Romney adviser, John Kingsdale, who in 2006 was put in charge of the state agency tasked with implementing Romney’s healthcare plan. In 2009, Kingsdale attended three White House meetings on healthcare.
A third Romney adviser, John McDonough, attended four White House healthcare meetings. McDonough shared an “innovator in health” award with the Massachusetts governor, after leading a health advocacy group in Massachusetts and working with Romney as a consumer advocate on the legislation.
Though Obama has repeatedly said that he modeled Obamacare on Romney’s healthcare plan, Romney has tried to wash his hands of the association.
“He does me the great favor of saying that I was the inspiration of his plan. If that’s the case, why didn’t you call me?” Romney said in a GOP debate. “Why didn’t you ask what was wrong? Why didn’t you ask if this was an experiment, what worked and what didn’t? … I would have told him, ‘What you’re doing, Mr. President, is going to bankrupt us.’”
Obamacare’s most unpopular feature, the individual mandate that requires all citizens to purchase a healthcare plan, was lifted wholesale from Romney’s healthcare reform package, which he touted as a way of “expanding coverage to all our citizens.”
Gruber’s involvement is the most damning association for Romney, and the GOP candidate has done his best to play down the connection. Gruber, however, has not.
He told NBC that Romney was “the father of health-care reform. I think he is the single person most responsible for health care reform in the United States. … If Mitt Romney had not stood up for this reform in Massachusetts … I don’t think it would have happened nationally. So I think he really is the guy with whom it all starts.”
.. Zing!
If you hate Obamacare, how in the world can you support Romney?
Where in the world did you ever get that conclusion?
Romney is nothing more than a white Obama. We MUST defeat him in the Primary’s
Anyone else is better.
If the Republicans back Romney in the Primary’s I will be an independent before the next election.I will not stay with a party that will give me another loser such as Dole, McCain and now Romney.
Per Ann Coulter:
ROMNEY/CAIN yeah BABY!!!!
Barf GTHAC
Excerpt:
When Mitt Romney is asked, as he often is, to explain the fact that Obamacare was modeled after Romneycare, he asks the President: “If that’s the case, why didn’t you call me? Why didn’t you ask what was wrong? Why didn’t you ask if this was an experiment, what worked and what didn’t…I would have told him, ‘What you’re doing, Mr. President, is going to bankrupt us.’”
Now, Michael Isikoff, the Newsweek veteran who is best known for his investigative reporting on the Monica Lewinsky flap, is out with a lengthy report divulging “fresh details” on how the Obama administration relied on the designers of Romneycare in fashioning their own health-care law.
Despite the report’s somewhat breathless tone, it’s actually old news that Mitt Romney’s health-care experts helped design Obamacare.
Jonathan Gruber, the MIT economist who was the architect of both laws, received nearly $400,000 as a consultant to the Obama administration for “technical assistance in evaluating options for national healthcare reform.” (Gruber frequently failed to mention this fact when opining on the bill in the press.)
Jonathan Gruber
LYING opportunists and LIARS!
I have really come to respect a great many of my Conservative brothers and sisters here. But how any of you can vote Romney (I’ll vote Third Party) is beyond me. We won’t get 60 Senate seats We may not even get the Senate. I’d rather gridlock Obama and beat the Dems to death until we get a real conservative then keep slowly sinking with the GOP version of Obama. I will NEVER vote Romney.
I hope Cain tears him a new one tonight.
So you think that after three individual professional sell their services, they must go out of business and no longer work. Do not care for the free market in labor do you. Sort of removes the professional out of professional doesn’t it.
The MSM so wants Romney for the nominee so 0bama does not have to take all of the blame for 0bamacare! Just say NO to Mittens. All conservatives need to unite and stand behind one candidate and I believe that candidate is Herman Cain!
Romney is responsible for not only RomneyCare but also gay marriage in Mass. which has influenced other states around the country. If he every is elected, HE WILL NOT REPEAL OBAMACARE. He will also not even try to stop the gay aggenda. In many ways, he is worse than McCain.
Romney is to the right of Huntsman but that is about it. Any other GOP candidate would be a vast improvement over him.
Romney is officially DONE! He just Rick Perry’ed himself. Wait for the blowback.
Oh please...
Double dealing? Consulting with the other side? The very enemies of our precious Constitution that Pubbies are supposedly defending for the survival of this republic? The side whom Romney himself is running against and is now (deceptively and opportunistically) criticizing for *his* mission for power and political gain?
Establishment elites and hypocrites, indeed.
If Ann Coulter is conservative, then my name is Michael Jordan. She doesn’t get any respect from me anymore
Absolutely!
Romney was never ever consrvative. Rick Perry is and always has been conservative, but he was the victim of a Romney “gotcha” moment where the anti-Hispanics in the GOP got to portray him as soft on “illegals.” He’s not soft on illegals of any ethnic background, and the state of Texas has spent a fortune on border control under him.
Ask Mittens about this. He avoided ever being questioned, miraculously enough, because the press wants Romney to be the GOP candidate. But the realty is that Romney passed the “Massachussetts Dream Act,” which is a heck of a lot more liberal that Perry’s signing of a bill passed by 176 out of 200 Texas legislators.
The bill passed under Perry was directed at students who were residents of the sate and had grown up and ben educated in the state of Texas by parents who may have been illegal but had lived there long enough to pay state and local taxes, plus federal taxes and SS to somebody else’s account (and you think the feds don’t know who they are????).
Romney’s Dream Act required nothing from the illegal immigrans and was much more iiberal than the Texas act. But since many illegals in MA are Africans or Muslims (such as Bambi’s relatives) and not Hispanic, I guess the “anti-illegal” crowd here doesn’t care.
Karl Rove, Hannity, O’Reilly, the entire Faux News team, are pimping for RINO Romney. Tonight Frank Klutz will tell us all how Romney won the debate. Romney will never be asked tough questions tonight by the moderators. They will once again focus on Perry. Cain and Bachmann will bring up the money for illegal kids again and innoculations. No one will ask Richey Rich Mitt McCain anything about RomneyCare. Also look for each and every one of them to be asked if they think Mormanism is a cult. Each one of them, except the two Mormans on stage, will lie through their teeth and say they don’t believe it’s a cult. The moderators will not ask them do they think Mormans are Christians. They would all say no and Romney would be embarrased. The media will NEVER EMBARASS their handpicked liberal to run against their hero O-Bomb-A.
This is good fodder for the debate. Hope campaigns are aware of it.
The failures of Romney and RomneyCare have been posted a good one thousand plus threads on FR alone going back to the first drafting of the bill in mid-2005.
THe general consensus that RomneyCare was destined to be a failure was widely known inside ROmney’s inner circle, inside the policy wonk circles in the Massachusetts political elite, and in the larger Medical and Health Insurance industry since no later than late 2005.
SIX YEARS LATER AND MITT ROMNEY IS STILL UNABLE TO ADMIT HIS TOTAL FAILURE OF LEADERSHIP.
This law has literally destroyed the economy of Massachusetts and forced an entire generation of young people to flee the state as they can not possibly afford their medical benefits costs and potential employers can not possibly afford to hire due to the medical benefits costs.
MITT ROMNEY WAS TOLD BY AT LEAST ONE HUNDRED INFLUENTIAL PEOPLE IN THE HEALTHCARE/INSURANCE FIELDS IN THE YEAR BEFORE HE SIGNED THE LAW THAT THIS WAS THE END RESULT. SIX YEARS LATER AND MITT ROMNEY IS STILL UNABLE TO ADMIT HIS TOTAL FAILURE OF LEADERSHIP.
You know who he listened to in the year of drafting this bill? Oligarchic Hospital Boards of Directors, Monopolisitc Health Insurance CEOs, Socialist Economics Professors, and an assortment of other people who had self serving interests in creating a Fascist Oligarchy over 1/6th of the economy of Massachusetts.
SIX YEARS LATER AND MITT ROMNEY IS STILL UNABLE TO ADMIT HIS TOTAL FAILURE OF LEADERSHIP.
Perry is a conservative? The day I saw his offical getting into the race speech is looked like Scott Brown 2.0 or GWB 2.0. His pro illegal stance or weak border enforcement is enough to disqualify him as a candidate if you are a true conservative. Add the fact he bought into a lobby of someone with cancer in his rationale for mandating girls are forced to get the HPV vaccine as standard.
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