Free Republic

BOSTON — On the Republican campaign trail, the health care debate has focused on the mandatory coverage that Mitt Romney signed into law as governor in 2006. But back in Massachusetts the conversation has moved on, and lawmakers are now confronting the problem that Mr. Romney left unaddressed: the state’s spiraling health care costs. After three years of study, the state’s legislative leaders appear close to producing bills that would make Massachusetts the first state — again — to radically revamp the way doctors, hospitals and other health providers are paid. Although important details remain to be negotiated, the legislative...

Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain on Wednesday said his rival Mitt Romney would have to “deal with” the health care law he passed in Massachusetts, which Cain grouped with ObamaCare as “government-centered” health care. “I do not support the Massachusetts health care law,” Cain said at a lunch sponsored by the American Spectator and held at the offices of Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform. While he didn't explicitly say the two laws were similar, he did mention them in tandem, emphasizing, “I want to get to get away from this government takeover to health care.” He said he preferred...

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...

In his first one-on-one national TV interview since kicking off his presidential campaign, Texas Gov. Rick Perry referred to Mitt Romney as “Obama-lite” and charged that the former Massachusetts governor is blurring lines between Republicans and Democrats. But Perry told Fox News host Sean Hannity on Wednesday that his differences with Romney aren’t personal. “Oh, it’s business,” he said. “I just think it’s important for the people of America and certainly in a Republican primary to see the clear differences that the candidates have. We need to nominate someone who has a stark clear difference between the Republican nominee and...

Ron Suskind’s controversial new book, “Confidence Men” reveals how President Barack Obama came to embrace “RomneyCare” as a model of reform.For example, it reveals that in a memo to President Obama concerning potential health care reform options, White House chief health care official Nancy-Ann DeParle, directed Obama’s attention to the only working model for reform in the country: Massachusetts, whose health care overhaul bill passed in 2005 under a brokered deal between then-governor Mitt Romney and the state’s Democratic legislature.” (p. 262) Suskind goes on to demonstrate that President Obama, who previously had not embraced the individual mandate, was...

Failure: ObamaCare is supposed to increase health coverage and slow spending. The promises of RomneyCare in Massachusetts were the same. But it has neither brought universal coverage nor contained costs. The failure of former Gov. Mitt Romney's health care reform to provide universal coverage in Massachusetts is well-documented. As many as 100,000 in the state remain without a health plan. Less well documented, however, are the aggregate costs of health care reform in the Bay State since RomneyCare took effect in 2006. But that doesn't mean there are no new costs associated with the law. In a study that's likely...

Many politicians have talked of repealing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”).  Mitt Romney has said nullifying the healthcare law would be one of his first actions if he was elected president.  However, rather than just repealing the law and going back to the status-quo, with minor changes, the American people should demand true reform.In 2001, Milton Friedman, the famed, Nobel-prize winning economist, published an article titled “How to Cure Health Care.” (Although worthy of serious consideration, Friedman’s analysis does not contain any explicit moral message, and is simply a policy analysis on healthcare.  For a more in-depth...

Washington (CNN) - With the Republican base largely unified in its contempt for President Obama's health care law, Sen. Jim DeMint, an icon of the tea party movement, has been forced to explain his early support for former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney's health care plan, which was a model for reform on the federal level. The South Carolinian cited the "innovative" Massachusetts health care plan when he endorsed Romney's 2008 presidential bid, saying the plan leveraged "good conservative ideas" like bringing private insurance companies into the process. DeMint told CNN over the weekend at the Republican Leadership Conference in New...

Modern Medical Care is a Blessing Not a Right As last year’s health reform bill again permeates our public discourse many pundits have highlighted how socializing medicine will exacerbate our already precarious budget concerns. Much was also written regarding the evasion of public sentiment when Congress employed especially repugnant procedural tactics. While these aspects ridicule the hypocrisy of our elected representatives, they are secondary. Healthcare is not a right. It's a blessing. Medical treatment or more specifically how we finance it, cannot be considered an unalienable right. It’s a form of consumption. Your right to own a car does not...

Two heartbroken parents have slammed 'inhumane' nurses who left their dead son lying in the middle of a hospital corridor and stepped over his corpse for more than ten hours thinking he was asleep. CCTV captured staff pulling the lifeless body of Peter Thompson along the floor like they were 'dragging the body of a dead animal'. Today a coroner said his death was 'wholly preventable' and believes he could have survived but for the neglect of nursing staff, three of whom now face disciplinary proceedings. 41-year-old Mr Thompson had taken a cocktail of drink and drugs but instead of...

Palin fires shot at Romney at Bunker Hill By NBC's Shawna Thomas, Alex Moe, and Mark Murray In remarks made at Bunker Hill in Massachusetts -- of all places -- Sarah Palin fired a shot at Mitt Romney over the health-care mandate that Romney signed into law in the state in 2006.The remarks came just before Romney formally announces his presidential bid in nearby New Hampshire, which Palin also plans to visit later today."In my opinion, any mandate coming from government is not a good thing, so obviously ... there will be more the explanation coming from former governor, Romney,...

Palin just ripped apart Romneycare at Bunker Hill. Said Mitt will have problems with tea party folksPhoto of Sarah Palin at Bunker Hill.

Health care is more than just one-sixth of the American economy. It is a source of well-being for individuals and families. We are blessed with much that is good in American health care. But we have taken a turn for the worse with ObamaCare, with its high taxes and vastly expanded federal control over our lives. I believe the better course is to empower the states to determine their own health care futures. First, the good news: Health care in the United States has made remarkable advances in our lifetimes. Dramatic improvements in medical technology have expanded both the length...

Mitt Romney must really want to distance himself from health care once and for all. The former Massachusetts governor wrote an opinion piece in Thursday’s USA Today in which he says his first act as president would be to repeal the health-care overhaul law—which President Obama has said was modeled after Romney’s own legislation in Massachusetts. Romney calls for a market-driven approach to fixing health care while “reforming” the tax code to promote individual ownership of health insurance. The plan bears some similarities to Sen. John McCain’s 2008 proposal. Romney, one of the expected 2012 GOP candidates, will speak about...

On Thursday, the healing begins. Mitt Romney won’t be apologizing for Romneycare in his health care speech Thursday. But he will be addressing it, according to a Romney aide.“He’ll address it, but the main focus of the speech will be what his plans will be going forward,” the aide tells National Review Online…“What will be clear is that number one, he’s got the same position as every other 2012er when it comes to the repeal of Obamacare,” the aide says. “Secondly, he’ll be the first of those candidates to lay out his plan for replacing Obamacare with reforms that will...

Here are the first three words Willard Mitt Romney needs to say in Michigan tomorrow, but never will. “I screwed up.” The only way for Willard to move on, get some closure, etc. on this grand fiasco of RomneyCare is to finally man up and admit that in 2006 the Democrats in Massachusetts beat him like a rented mule. Acknowledge the undisputable truth that, thanks to his raw political ambition, we have tax-paying American citizens being fined $2,000 for the crime of having no dough, to quote The Band. Oh, and by the way, illegal aliens still get free health...

Last week, shortly before a certain ex-terrorist (now pining for the fjords) swallowed the news cycle, there were still some folks paying attention to the nascent GOP primary race. In an early stop in New Hampshire, Mitt Romney attended a forum hosted by Americans for Prosperity and moderated by Tim Phillips.It wouldn’t exactly take a modern day Nostradamus to know that Phillips was going to ask him about the health care plan he signed into law when he was the governor of the Bay State. The somewhat uncomfortable scene which then unfolded seemed to resemble a display of dancing which...

Earlier this month, the landmark Massachusetts health care reform law turned five years old. Democrats were quick to applaud the anniversary, as the Bay State law is the model for the federal health care reform package that passed last year. The anniversary has proved especially inconvenient for former Massachusetts Governor and probable Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who argued forcefully for his state's reforms. In 2006 he boldly stated, "Every uninsured citizen in Massachusetts will soon have affordable health insurance and the cost of health care will be reduced." Five years later, that prediction has proved false. Worse, the Massachusetts...

Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney surprised donors this morning at the Harvard Club in New York with an ambivalent answer to the question of whether America is ready to seriously alter its large entitlement programs. Romney, speaking to more than 100 donors and supporters at the private breakfast, responded to a question from his supporters on the issue. "I don't know," he replied, according to a source in the room, before going on to warn that Social Security and Medicare are -- in the source's paraphrase -- "basically the third rails in politics and he doesn’t know if we’re going...

It remains to be seen whether Mitt Romney will attempt to distance himself from his disastrous health care legislation in the upcoming presidential campaign. However, from his previous statements, it is clear that he once envisioned RomneyCare as a national model. Here is what he said leading up to his failed presidential campaign. ...During a speech in Baltimore on Feb. 2, 2007, Romney outlined his ambitions for the Massachusetts plan. "I'm proud of what we've done," he said. "If Massachusetts succeeds in implementing it, then that will be a model for the nation." Last month Romney's dream came true. If...