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Mitt Romney's presidential campaign broke with congressional Republicans on Monday by arguing that the individual mandate upheld by the Supreme Court last week is a penalty, not a tax. http://thehill.com/video/campaign/235855-romney-team-agrees-with-obama-mandate-not-a-tax Duck duck who's got the Duck ?

On the surface, the title of this article seems paradoxical. How can any conservative in the USA even contemplate the concept of the government creating a single-payer health insurance system covering all Americans and, in effect, ending private major medical health insurance? In this post I hope to make the conservative case for a single payer incontrovertible for those occupying the centre-right politically. Conservatives are supposed to be the defenders of business. Yet our current health care system works as an albatross around the neck of American business. Likewise, the piecemeal reforms of ObamaCare seem only to make some problems...

A defining moment in Mitt Romney's post-pro-life-conversion political career came in his third year as governor of Massachusetts, when he decided Catholic hospitals would be required under his interpretation of a new state law to give rape victims a drug that can induce abortions. Romney announced this decision — saying it was the "right thing for hospitals" to do — just two days after he had taken the opposite position. The story begins in 1975, when Massachusetts enacted a law that said, "No privately controlled hospital .. shall be required to permit any patient to have an abortion ... or...

Jim Pethokoukis spotlights a new Health Affairs study on how Romneycare laid the foundation for Obamacare, and what it portends for the federal health insurance scene. In short: Expanded government coverage, higher taxpayer costs. Read here for details and analysis. His conclusion: The authors conclude that based on the Romneycare experience, Obamacare will improve coverage and not kill employer-based insurance, but containing costs will be a “considerable challenge.” That is probably the avenue Romney should use to a) attack Obamacare and b) present his own national health reform. But this study will perpetuate the meme that Romneycare was the prototype...

In what is being seen as a preview of a fully implemented Obamacare, government officials in Michigan are demanding that a 9-year-old child follow standard procedure and take a dangerous course of cancer medications that can cause additional cancer – even though the boy has had three scans indicating an absence of the disease. The case is being fought on behalf of Ken and Erin Stieler and their son Jacob by attorneys with the Home School Legal Defense Association. The organization concerns itself with home school rights, responsibilities and restrictions but also intercedes in cases that could have a significant...

Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick just exhorted legislators to overhaul the way the state pays for health care. He’s pushing for an end to the traditional arrangement of compensating doctors and hospitals for each service they provide. It’s not yet clear what will replace this “fee-for-service” payment system. But there’s growing support for a “global budget” model, under which primary care physicians would receive annual lump sums for each of their patients - regardless of how little or how much care they needed.

Another Tuesday, another failure by Mitt Romney to line up the party faithful behind him. Not only did Romney lose yesterday's contests in Alabama and Mississippi, but he finished third in both, putting him behind Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich. Even though Romney remains well ahead in the delegate count and even though he'll still likely win the nomination, he just can't put those nagging doubts among conservatives to rest. CNN political contributor Paul Begala writes for The Daily Beast that Romney has gone from inevitable to unelectable: "Somebody strap him to the roof of one of his Cadillacs and...

"I have received numerous e-mails over the last 36 hours asking if Mitt Romney really flip-flopped on his support of the Blunt Amendment, a motion to re-establish employers’ religious freedom over health insurance coverage. He did not, despite frantic coverage of his answer to a confusingly worded question from an Ohio reporter. But his reply signals that pro-lifers have a far deeper problem with the Republican presidential hopeful: he’s disengaged from our issues, dismissive of our concerns, and disinclined to give us the time of day..." read more... http://www.lifesite.net/news/romneys-blunt-problem-with-the-pro-life-movement

Mitt Romney, in an op-ed published in 2009 at USA Today, still viewable at mittromneycentral.com, pushed Obama to do nationally what he did in RomneyCare, in Massachusetts. His words: "There’s a better way. And the lessons we learned in Massachusetts could help Washington find it." emphasis ours: Our experience also demonstrates that getting every citizen insured doesn’t have to break the bank. First, we established incentives for those who were uninsured to buy insurance. Using tax penalties, as we did, or tax credits, as others have proposed, encourages “free riders” to take responsibility for themselves rather than pass their medical...

Forget Michigan. If Rick Santorum really wants to hand Mitt Romney his head he ought to challenge him in Massachusetts. It is here, not in Michigan, where Romney, governor for four years, made his political bones, first by running unsuccessfully against the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, and then defeating Democrat Shannon O'Brien for governor in 2002. It is also here where thousands of people -- to their total surprise -- woke up the other day to find that Romney ran the state as a "severely conservative" governor for four years. Who knew? That was before he declined to run for...

Rick Santorum backed Arlen Specter over Pat Toomey in 2004. It was a tough race with Toomey mounting a credible, well-financed challenge. Toomey’s candidacy, by his own estimation, was one of the precursors to the Tea Party movement: The “battle for the heart and soul of the Republican Party” between big spending moderates and committed conservatives that was evident in 2004 may have inspired subsequent Tea Party efforts, Toomey suggested. Despite losing out on key endorsements from leading Republican figures in 2004, Toomey believes his primary campaign created a strong foundation for conservative activism that translated into victory in 2010....

The dueling press releases from Mitt Romney's campaign and the DNC this afternoon shed light on a new issue in the campaign: contraception. At a campaign event in Colorado last night, Romney criticized the Obama administration's new contraception benefit rule, calling the decision "a violation of conscience." The DNC shot back today with a press release saying Romney's campaign "misleads" on the issue, pointing out that Massachusetts's health care law kept in place a similar contraception mandate. "Romney is being hypocritical criticizing the President on contraception when his health care law kept in place a similar state mandate," the release...

If only the Democrats had decided to socialize the food industry or housing, Romneycare would probably still be viewed as a massive triumph for conservative free-market principles -- as it was at the time. It's not as if we had a beautifully functioning free market in health care until Gov. Mitt Romney came along and wrecked it by requiring that Massachusetts residents purchase their own health insurance. In 2007, when Romneycare became law, the federal government alone was already picking up the tab for 45.4 percent of all health care expenditures in the country. Until Obamacare, mandatory private health insurance...

I have not been able to find the entire On The Record Bondi interview, either in video OR professional transcript, so I transcribed it myself. Hopefully the full segment video, with transcript, will become available, so any mistakes I may have made can be corrected. Below is the transcription of Greta's Pam Bondi interview, transcribed directly from the TV segment [the later rebroadcast]. (Note: In the rebroadcast, there was a second or two in which there was a loss of audio and a black screen; I have noted it in the transcript]Greta's 1-27-2012 interview On The Record with Pam Bondi...

Moreover, as a political argument, how will Romney be able to employ our most potent weapon in a way that won’t be perceived as hypocritical? Try to imagine a general election debate over healthcare between Romney and Obama: Romney: “Obamacare is a disaster.” Obama: “If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan. People outside of the exchange will be unaffected by the changes. Further, Mr. Romney, we actually got the ideas of subsidized healthcare exchanges and the individual mandate from you. Weren’t they pretty successful in Massachusetts?”

Debating in Tampa, Florida in late-January, while falsely characterizing Newt Gingrich’s income from his government consulting work, Mitt Romney denied that Bain did “any work with the government like Medicaid and Medicare”. Now we learn that Bain, under Romney’s “supervision”, purchased and ran the Damon Corporation, who pled guilty to Federal conspiracy charges as a result of tens of millions of dollars in systemic Medicare fraud committed under Romney’s and Bain’s control. Damon was fined over $119-million which was, at the time, the largest criminal healthcare fine in Massachusetts history and Mr. Romney’s participation was characterized in 1996 by Corporate...

Former Sen. Norm Coleman is advising Mitt Romney. He has also advised us not to get our hopes up about Obamacare repeal. "You will not repeal the act in its entirety, but you will see major changes, particularly if there is a Republican president," Coleman told BioCentury This Week television in an interview that aired on Sunday. "You can't whole-cloth throw it out. But you can substantially change what's been done."

After Rudy Giuliani, my old boss, dropped out of the 2008 GOP presidential sweepstakes, I supported Mitt Romney. That was not a difficult choice for me. The former Massachusetts governor is a good man and he loves the country as is. That I wish he were more conservative is not a deal-breaker for me. I wished the same thing about Rudy. Mitt, like Rudy, would make a fine chief executive. More to the point, the choice in a nomination contest is not candidate A versus one’s ideal nominee. It is candidate A versus candidates B, C, D, et al. On...

Remember when they laughed off, ridiculed and otherwise denied Sarah Palin’s assertion that Obamacare would usher in death panels? Listen to this neurosurgeon, fresh from a seminar in Washington DC, tell about what it is that the HHS has in store for seniors: (AUDIO AT LINK) The Anchoress calls it what it is. Evil: So if you are a 70 year-old Nancy Pelosi, or Paul Krugman — with a potent private health insurance plan such as the one enjoyed by Members of Congress and other bureaucrats — you will get every appropriate surgery and treatment applicable. But if you are...

After seven debates and many more missed opportunities, the other GOP candidates finally pressed Mitt Romney on his Massachusetts health-care record in a serious way on Tuesday night. Let's extend the scrutiny and try to sort the substance from the merely polemical, because the policy stakes ........(skip) The exchange began when Rick Santorum scored Mr. Romney for lacking health-care "credibility," since the 2006 Bay State reform "was the basis for ObamaCare." If the first claim is for primary voters to decide, no one who knows anything about health policy on the left or right would deny the second: When Democrats...