Romney’s vaunted healthcare plan also disappoints. It forces individuals to purchase medical coverage and slaps the non-compliant with “tax penalties,” as a state-government radio ad described them last November. These charges were $219 in 2007, equal to the personal exemption on Massachusetts’ state tax. However, this year’s formula could crank this figure up to $912. Businesses with at least 11 workers either must offer health insurance or face annual fines of $295-per-uninsured employee. This is consistent with Romney’s statement at a January 5 GOP presidential debate: “I like mandates.”
This program is run not by the free market, but by the Commonwealth Health Insurance Connector, a Romney-created government bureaucracy. For 2007, reports the Pacific Research Institute’s Sally Pipes, RomneyCare is expected to have cost taxpayers some $619 million. That’s $147 million and 31 percent above original projections.
Romney blames all this on tinkering Democratic state legislators.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen down the road as the Democrats get their hands on it,” Romney told the National Review Institute. “I was a little concerned at the signing ceremony when Ted Kennedy showed up.”
Romney’s Pontius-Pilate-like hand washing is thoroughly unconvincing. Bay State Democrats would have struggled to hijack health reform based on tax incentives, choice, and ownership, as a true free-marketeer would have insisted, rather than RomneyCare’s easily scaled universal mandates, regulatory boards, and government-imposed standards.
a mixture of private and those totally down trodden coming from the government. T
Get off Romney's back. He was Governor of a State that has an 85% liberal Democrat Senate. EIGHTY FIVE PERCENT! You think that anything Romney introduced wasn't altered and re-written ad nauseum by these liberals? I'm a Massachusetts resident, conservative Repulican, and personally I think the man would make a tremendous leader. He is honest, something that his opponent's shills work very hard at to twist. He is brilliant, he has spine and he has moral character. He's a great statesman too. I think he's as firm a man as you'll find anywhere in politics. He makes liberal RINOS like Rudy, huckleberry and McInsane look like very unpleasant alternatives. If Mitt or Fred don't win the primary and the general election, then America is screwed for the next umpteen years. Mitt will fight the WOT and the war on our borders, unlike his major opponents in both parties.