More liberal scare tactics. Believe it or not, before the rise of the New Deal and Great Society, private charities used to take care of these people. Also, doctors considered it an obligation to care for such people. That all ended when government (a la Mitt) stepped in to socialize things. Those who believe in socialistic alternatives, such as Mittcare, don't know much about American history.
Ah, the good old days. IF only we could wave our magic wand and go back to the days when people took personal responsibility, where charity as a major force, when people didn’t take advantage of free things because they knew they were freeloaders, and when government hadn’t driven most of the charity work out of business in order to provide a more orderly and “fair” process of giving things away.
How do you implement that plan? Do you think the non-profit non-public hospital system is ready to take every indigent person today? BTW, I’m not trying to mock you, as I am sympathetic to your point of view. IN fact, I wonder sometimes why we even have “public” hospitals.
If we are going to have public hospitals, why would only private hospitals be expected to do charity, while public hospitals were immune? That would drive up the costs of running private hospitals as the public facilities would get only people who pay, and would have more money to improve, while the private hospitals would be saddled with the burden of providing free care, and people with money would turn to the better-funded facilities.
So how do we get rid of the public hospitals, and turn them back into private hands, so we can have real competition? The plan has to deal with that, along with the inevitable increase in deaths as we cut off the current benefits and people slowly migrate to the begging plan.
Frankly, there’s much more serious problems, like the idea of medical “insurance” covering routine exams. INSURANCE shouldn’t insure against known and repeated events, but against unknown and unique ones.
Romney care is not the most conservative approach to the problem. But it is a more conservative approach than the status quo, and it is a push toward a market-based solution which if implemented, could mitigate the problems enough to relieve the pressure for true socialized medicine.