Please. I had almost forgotten.
Posted on 09/22/2011 3:04:07 PM PDT by xzins
...publishing a series about Massachusetts’ groundbreaking health care reform law. This first piece explains how the idea was hatched — Romney was inspired by Staples founder Thomas G. Stemberg — made its way through the Democratically controlled legislature, was embraced by business groups, and eventually signed into law by Romney on April 12, 2006.
Mooney reports that Romney’s political advisers weren’t too keen on Romney — who was even then expected to just serve one term as governor before making a run for the presidency — embracing a traditionally liberal issue, but ultimately settled on what they and Romney saw as a fairly conservative approach: encouraging individuals to take personal responsibility for their health care costs by buying insurance coverage through exchanges:
The first step was finding a way to make the 37 percent who could afford insurance but didn’t have it buy in. Romney’s answer came in part from an administration consultant, Jonathan Gruber, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a leading adviser, usually to Democrats, on health care reform issues….“What my numbers showed is that it made enormous sense to have the individual mandate,’’ Gruber recalled. Without it, the money available for new insurance subsidies would cover half as many people.
“Romney was intrigued with it because of the personal responsibility aspects,’’ said Gruber, recalling his one meeting with the governor. And if younger, healthier people were coaxed into the system, the cost of premiums would moderate for a larger population.
“There was the moral ‘free rider’ argument, but the numbers said it was financially feasible, too,’’ Gruber said. [...]
There were other new elements. Murphy had a “eureka moment’’ after a meeting with officials of the conservative Heritage Foundation. He was raving about their concept of an “exchange’’ to provide one-stop shopping for small businesses and individuals seeking health coverage from commercial insurers. This would also prove a forerunner to Obama’s national plan.
Today, conservatives see these ideas as unconstitutional conspiracies to usurp individual freedoms, but back in 2005, America’s greatest liberal Senator needed some convincing. In fact, up to that point, the late Ted Kennedy had opposed the mandate and only came to support the provision as part of a larger reform package. “I’ve never been one for individual mandates in the past, but I do think that the way this has been proposed, in that everybody will do their part, that’s a compromise,’’ Kennedy said in December 2005. “I can buy into that.” (Incidentally, current Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick experienced a similar conversion).
Kennedy bought it and so did Romney, who came to see the mandate as the “ultimate conservative” solution. “It’s the ultimate conservative idea, which is that people have responsibility for their own care, and they don’t look to government to take of them if they can afford to take care of themselves,” he told the Boston Globe in June 2005. “I think it appeals to people on both sides of the aisle: insurance for everyone without a tax increase.” He even went so far as to suggest that it can be applied to the nation as a whole — although he quickly walked back these statements and proposed an altogether different health care proposal during his 2008 presidential campaign.
The only defense Romney can offer for Romneycare is that he was trying to prevent the Democrats from passing something worse.
But it’s a weak defense at best. Romney’s weakness on this issue is that he chose to tweak the system instead of recognizing that the system is broken and needs replacing.
The only real reform is complete deregulation, severing the link between health care and employment, tax free medical savings accounts, and creating a true free market in health care where people pay cash for basic maintenance, and have insurance against catastrophic events.
My wife, our hospital and our former insurance company have been going around for months about whether our son’s getting a cast is considered a doctor visit or “surgery”. I bet that you could cut over half the cost by eliminating the red tape.
Please. I had almost forgotten.
Sure is a ... jovial cuss, isn't he.
Both of them are evil! Two mini me 0bamas!
Did you read the rest of my post?
My point, which I seem to have failed to make properly when posting from my phone in a waiting room, is that Romney’s flaw is that he is wedded to conventional wisdom. Instead of developing an alternative to Democrat proposals and trying to sell them, he just went along and nibbled around the edges.
People who have vague political leanings but no true core principals often do this, and call it leadership. Richard Nixon was like that. He talked a conservative game, but basically continued the Great Society, just at a slower pace.
On the other hand, real leaders, like Ronald Reagan, challenge the status quo. Reagan rewrote a chunk of the tax code, and gave us twenty years of growth. He also kicked the legs out from under the Soviet Union, helping to cause it’s collapse.
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