2009 Romney op-ed: Obama should use my individual mandate in ObamaCare

No, RomneyCare is just for the states, Romney says. But according to Buzzfeed, Romney suggested otherwise in July of 2009:

Health care cannot be handled the same way as the stimulus and cap-and-trade bills. With those, the president stuck to the old style of lawmaking: He threw in every special favor imaginable, ground it up and crammed it through a partisan Democratic Congress. Health care is simply too important to the economy, to employment and to America’s families to be larded up and rushed through on an artificial deadline. There’s a better way. And the lessons we learned in Massachusetts could help Washington find it.

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 costs on to others. This doesn’t cost the government a single dollar. Second, we helped pay for our new program by ending an old one — something government should do more often. The federal government sends an estimated $42 billion to hospitals that care for the poor: Use those funds instead to help the poor buy private insurance, as we did.

Andrew McCarthy at NRO has serious problems with this:

This seems very significant. A number of us have expressed concerns that Romney cannot effectively confront Obama on Obamacare, the wrongheadedness and unpopularity of which make it the Republicans’ most crucial issue in the campaign. In response, Romney posits that he is a Tenth Amendment guy who saw what he was doing as right for his state, and perhaps other states, but certainly not a national model to be adopted at the federal level. For what it’s worth, I’ve contended that those claims are utterly unpersuasive (some are downright frivolous). But that hardly matters now. The op-ed demonstrates that Mitt regarded Romneycare precisely as a model the federal government ought to adopt, and that the “tax penalties” by which Massachusetts’s individual mandate are enforced were a good fit for Congress and the Obama administration to impose by federal law.

Besides the individual mandate, Gov. Romney’s op-ed also proposed government-managed cures to address the government-caused cost spiral generated by the government-designed fee-for-service structure. Patients, he suggested, should be “required to pay a portion of their bill, except for certain conditions” — to be chosen, of course, by the government. Providers would be “paid an annual fixed fee for the primary care of an individual and a separate fixed fee for the treatment of a specific condition” — said fixed fees to be fixed by the government.

Nowhere does the op-ed suggest that government involvement is the principal cause of cost inflation, and that maybe prices would come down if people paid all their ordinary health expenses out of pocket and had insurance, purchased in a truly free market, for catastrophes and other high-expense conditions. (Romney does argue that the current un-free market in health insurance is preferable to a “single-payer” system of government-provided coverage.) Nowhere does the op-ed consider whether the federal government’s role ought to be limited to policing against interstate fraud, with the states left to deal with other issues — without federal interference and without passing the costs of their solutions along to the rest of the country. And nowhere does the op-ed make any mention of the Constitution.

This is why so many people believe that Romney will not repeal ObamaCare. He won’t even admit that RomneyCare was wrong and now we see that he WAS pushing the RomneyCare model for the entire country.

And this is why, to quote from Santorum, that Romney is “uniquely unqualified” to take on Obama.


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