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Posted on 07/02/2012 10:16:39 AM PDT by SoConPubbie
(CNSNews.com) - In a presentation about his health-care reform plan delivered at the Heritage Foundation on Jan. 6, 2006, then-Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney said that for his plan to work it would be necessary to first subsidize health insurance for a segment of the population not already receiving government health-care subsidies and then mandate that everyone in the state buy health insurance.
To do otherwise, Romney said, “would be crazy.” His speech was accompanied by a Powerpoint presentation that graphically laid out some of the basics of his proposal and the health insurance situation that then prevailed in Massachusetts.
On April 12, 2006, three months after he spoke at Heritage, Romney signed his landmark health-care reform proposal into law. The law said that people earning up to 300 percent of the federal poverty level would get subsidies to buy insurance. (The federal poverty level for a family of four is now $23,050, according to the Department of Human Services. That means a family of four earning up $69,150 per year now qualifies for health-insurance subsidies in Massachusetts.)
“And then, finally, something I am going to call the personal responsibility principle,” Romney told the Heritage Foundation. “You may call this an individual mandate. I don’t. I call it the personal responsibility principle.
“Let me make it real clear: To tell people in our society today that they have to go out and buy insurance would be unfair and wrong. Because right now, they don’t have products they can afford,” said Romney. “And if people are poor, they don’t have any subsidy that they can rely on to help them get a product. So, it would be crazy to say to people, hey, you’re [un]insured, you better go get it. They can’t afford it.
“But once we put in place the reforms I am describing, with new affordable products as well as a subsidized product, where your premium can be as low as $2.30 a week, now everybody can get insurance,” said Romney. “And that’s basically what this slide says. And that is, look, now that we have these products available for you, we want everybody to get insurance and you have responsibility of having insurance, and we are going to mandate that you have insurance.
“Now, how do we mandate it?” said Romney. “Well, I won’t spend a lot of time on this, other than to indicate that we are going to insist that everybody be covered one way or the other and that those who don’t comply have certain problems. They are going to lose their personal tax exemption. We will withhold any of their tax refund. We will keep it in an account at the state level which we will be able to tap to pay the hospital if they go there for free care. The legislature has also put in place consideration of not providing drivers’ licenses to people unless they can show their health insurance coverage, and so forth.
“We also, I just note there, we also, if people go and get free care and don’t pay for it, we go after them,” said Romney. “We garnish wages if we have to make sure that we get paid. People are either going to buy insurance or they are going to pay for their own care. They’re not going to say, I got care and you, Mr. Taxpayer, or you Mrs. Premium Payer, you have to pay for me.”
Later in the presentation, Romney said: “The money follows the person not the institution. We give money to individuals to allow them to buy insurance. We do not give Medicaid money to hospitals, and say, gosh, you got a lot of uninsured that you care for so we are going to give you a check this year for $50 million. No, the state and the federal government give the money to individuals to buy insurance and they get to go to whichever providers they want to go to.”
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“Waiting for the posters to say, “well Romney’s a states rights kinda guy”. Bull shit, he’s a socialist, plain and simple.”
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And we’re waiting for folks like you to give us a viable option to Romney instead of your continual bit*hing.
Since it’s the law that anyone who shows up in ER must be treated then we already have health care for all but sone are not paying for it. I personally agree that there needs to be some adjustment for this - i.e. deducting a payment for a national pool for major medical from government assistance (although the rats will probably screw this up by “subsidizing” it along with free cell phones and debit cards for whatever). We ought to invoice Mexico for treating it’s citizens, there ought to be tort reform, insurance over state lines..etc etc.
There are probably a ton of ways to handle this - all of them better than the monster that is now unfortunately the law of the land.
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This was the exact position of the Heritage Foundation at the time he mede this presentation. Heritage was calling for mandates for years before Romney adopted their position. It's also the position that Newt and many, many other conservatives held, as they sw it as the only way to make a certain segment of teh population pay for at least a portion of their keep.
Thank you SoConPubbie..excellent thread. Hope you are well.
Here’s the thing - the lesser of two evils is still evil.
It is what it is. The greater evil would be to return Obama to office, a move that cannot benefit anybody, not even his own supporters, who shall inevitably suffer just as much as all the rest of us, because the economy will be reduced to a total shambles, and misery and poverty will be widely shared. Sic semper tyrannis. (Thus always to tyrants, for those of you from Rio Linda.)
Mitt Romney may still preach some kind of immigration amnesty, and some kind of medical services delivery system based on government assistance, but the reality is, he will probably do it within the legal structure as it currently exists, and to some degree, restore the climate for economic expansion in a viable way.
Mitt might be some kind of skunk, but for now, he is OUR skunk.
Romney: When looting and lying just aren’t quite enough to bring conservatives into the fold.
Whatever the option, it will be to Not vote for Romney. Ever. And we can do that. It is our vote.
Romney has a history that definitely doesn’t fit where we are now.
Makes you wonder what he will say about this when he debates Obama in the fall.
The old bait-and-switch, the used car salesman's stock-in-trade:
The 'editorial we' rarely works on this website. And it sure doesn't in the case of Romney. He's the GOP's skunk. Not mine.
But I learned a long time ago that if it sounds too good to be true, it more than likely ain't!
In that picture, you can see exactly how unhappy Mitt Romney was when he was forced by the MA legislature and Teddy Kennedy to sign Socialized Medicine into law.
In that picture, you can see exactly how unhappy Mitt Romney was when he was forced by the MA legislature and Teddy Kennedy to sign Socialized Medicine into law.
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