You have to know that if Hillary, Teddy-the-Hutt and others on the far left are praising Mitt on his healthcare "reform" plan, it has to be a truly awful idea.
Read what he spins about it in my previous post, then read this rebuttal for the reasons why he's
a) Full of shit (perhaps he should see a doctor about that problem?)
b) A poster boy for bringing back the analogy section of the SAT test (i.e., a good analogy never hurts, a bad one can kill a state's economy)
Give Mr. Romney credit as a rare Republican willing at least to discuss health care. In that he's miles ahead of GOP Congressional leaders, who won't even vote on pro-market reforms. We certainly favor state policy experiments, and Mr. Romney may have done the best he could given his far-left legislature. The new law also avoids the worst coercive pitfalls of Hillary Clinton's 1993 reform.On the other hand, his law is far from the market-based approach the Governor claimed in an op-ed on this page yesterday. The core flaw is that the plan forces individuals to buy health insurance, and penalizes businesses that don't provide it, before deregulating the market for private health insurance. So the state is forcing people to buy insurance many will need subsidies to afford, which is a recipe for higher taxes and more government intervention down the road. Could this be why Mrs. Clinton, Ted Kennedy and the Families USA government medicine lobby are all praising it to the skies? Just asking.
Mr. Romney compares his "individual mandate" to the command that everyone get car insurance. However, states only force people who drive to have car insurance, and only then to insure for liability if they harm others. Drivers needn't take out collision insurance for damage they do to their own cars or bodies.
But wait, there's more lies and misunderstandings embedded in Mitt's blatant attempt to set himself up as compassionate and acceptable to libtards in '08 plan:
The mandate is also supposed to solve the problem of "free riders" who show up in emergency rooms without insurance and thus stick their costs on taxpayers. But studies have shown that the cost of such "uncompensated care" -- i.e., for people the government isn't already subsidizing through Medicaid -- is a tiny fraction of the nation's medical budget.The truth is that Americans have far better health coverage than the media and liberal politicians contend. A vast and expensive ($330 billion a year) Medicaid system covers people who are genuinely poor, and emergency rooms must treat anyone regardless of ability to pay. In Massachusetts as in every other state, about 20% of the "uninsured" are Medicaid-eligible but haven't bothered to sign up. Yet they can sign up whenever they need care. Another hefty chunk of the uninsured (40%) can easily afford insurance but choose not to buy it. There's no inherent free-rider problem here, since they can be pursued for bad medical debts like any other debts.
The real people to worry about are those who are too well off to qualify for Medicaid but are priced out of the insurance market thanks to mandates and other regulations. The Romney plan will subsidize them for buying the compulsory insurance, but it does little on the regulatory side to make that insurance more affordable. Some of our friends praise the bill for setting up a government-sponsored insurance exchange to help people find coverage. But we don't see why a state exchange is preferable to a private marketplace such as eHealthinsurance.com (which doesn't even market individual policies in Massachusetts because of over-regulation).
Enjoy the state-of-the-art healthcare you have now kids, if this trend towards bending over for the socialists continues, we'll no longer have it right about the time we're all old enough to be coming down with the diseases we could have treated successfully had we only gotten them NOW.
This all just proves how STUPID people are becoming in our country (in MA in particular). Not only do the citizens there buy more lottery tickets (often using their welfare and unemployment checks to do it) than anywhere else, they think this is a great idea. Clearly we have an entire state of math idiots, and a math idiot is one thing, but one who's willing to hand over his or her individual freedom at the same time he's struggling to add 2+2? YIKES! Sends shivers down my spine I tell ya!
Posted by insomnomaniac at April 12, 2006 9:13 AM | TrackBack