E-mail updates
Follow on Twitter
Subscribe to RSSFor Mitt Romney, the issue of health-care mandates just won't seem to go away.
In an interview on FOX News today, Romney was questioned about his apparent support for an individual health-care mandate -- even on the federal level -- during a 2008 Republican presidential debate.
Romney sidestepped the specific question on FOX and repeated his familiar line on the campaign trail: "I believe we should get rid of Obamacare," Romney responded. "It's a disaster."
His critics continue to point to that 2008 Republican presidential debate, in which Romney responded to Charlie Gibson's comment that Romney "backed away from mandates on a national basis" by saying, "No, no, I like mandates."
MR. GIBSON: (Off mike) -- Governor Romney -- (off mike) -- mandate and that's an obstacle, although you've backed away from mandates on a national basis.
MR. ROMNEY: No, no, I like mandates. Do the mandates work? Mandates --
MR. THOMPSON: I beg your pardon? (Laughter.)
MR. ROMNEY: Let me --
MR. THOMPSON: I didn't know you were going to admit that.
MR. ROMNEY: Let me -- oh, absolutely.
MR. THOMPSON: You like mandates.
MR. ROMNEY: Let me tell you what kind of mandates I like, Fred, which is this -- M
R. THOMPSON: And what did you come up with? (Laughter.)
And there's a 2009 USA Today op-ed, in which Romney wrote: "There’s a better way [on health care]. And the lessons we learned in Massachusetts could help Washington find it."
He went on to say in the op-ed, "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."
Today, Romney once again explained that he thinks the mandate helped solve the problem in Massachusetts but would be wrong to implement on a national level.
"I have allowed and agree that a state should have the capacity -- if it wants -- to have a health-care mandate. We had that in my state," Romney said today. "Time and again, I've pointed out I'm not in favor of a health-care plan that includes a national mandate."
As Romney told Sean Hannity on his radio show last week, the primary reason he doesn't support the federal mandate is the 10th Amendment.
"Well there's something known as the Constitution, as you know, and the Constitution in the 10th Amendment says that powers not granted to the federal government are granted to or reserved by the states," Romney said. "So states have powers that the federal government does not have."
But Romney has also argued that his plan in Massachusetts was a 70-page bill compared to the national 2,700 page bill, and he says his state's health-care law didn't raise taxes, while the federal one did.
"[Obama] said he would cut taxes for middle income Americans," Romney said in Missouri this week. "Your taxes down? No. As a matter of fact, your costs have gone up in part because of Obamacare -- one of the worst ideas he came up with."
Leave a Comment:
Interviewer: Mr. Romney, as recent as July 2009, you were in favor of a federal individual mandate, when did you change your mind about this and why?
Mr. Romney: ...dodge question or some illogical statement about being against Obamacare...
Interviewer: So you are going to dodge the question or deflect instead of answering when and why you changed your opinion? Are you afraid of looking like a flip flopper or a panderer? You would instead prefer to appear as a liar?
Has anyone even thought of the billions of dollars our government will save ENDING Medicaid AND Medicare and the saving in lives and Emergency Room visits!!!??? And have you even thought of the lives saved and $$$ in bringing Medicine into the 21st century by using Preventive Medicine to the forefront and NOT an afterthought...Think about it!
Bobby-T -- why do you assume that ObamaCare will save lives and lower costs? Take a look at Europe if you want to see our future. Or Canada. It's pretty easy to get into a clinic for a primary care visit to be seen by a doctor we would call a PA here. Yes, most English "doctors" have about the same amount of training as a physician's assistant in the US. They're cheap (they work on salary and usually need a second job to pay the rent) and they miss things and when they do find somethng, they have to refer to a specialist. My cousin (a real-life doctor) exchanged with a French doctor a couple of decades ago. When he arrived in France, he had a long waiting list of neurology clients. At the end of the two years, 60 percent of those who had been on his waiting list had died and the majority of those deaths were for completely treatable conditions, if they're found early enough. The patients died because they had to wait a very long time for treatment because Rick had a long waiting list. That's standard through all the countries with "universal" health care. You have universal health INSURANCE, but you can't actually get care if you have anything that really needs a real doctor to treat it. You don't have to believe me. Just google it. Try something like "stroke care efficacy in Europe". That brought up several interesting articles that show that the rhetoric the Obama-ites like to tout about doesn't work out so well in practice. They can say anything they want, but reality proves they're wrong.
I'd rather have to pay for my health care directly and have access to it than have to pay for health insurance (estimated to go up 60% over the next half decade, btw) and not have access to medical treatment when I need it. Come to think of it, if I'm paying for overpriced insurance, I won't even have the option to pay an off-the-books doctor to treat me when the insurance denies the coverage -- which is another dirty little secret about European health coverage they don't tell you.
No, Romney was never in favor of a federal mandate.
The Universal health plan in Massachusetts was in the works before Romney was even governor there, too.
Most Americans, by now, understand there is a HUGE difference between a 70 page universal health plan
for one-state-only--- and --- a 2,200 page Federal mandate that includes new taxes, regulations, laws for the Entire Country !
You could do 70 pages in MA, because you did not have to pay for the bill, and having a new insurance plan for pre-existing conditions, and adjusting Medicare, Medicaid, etc. Congress may also use bigger type.
Part of the idea was to reduce the part of our GNP that goes to healthcare--from 16% and projected to go much higher--to something lower. (In Canada, where they have a "single-payer" plan like Medicare, it takes about 8% of GNP.)
Additional healthcare costs were estimated to add $1,500 to the price of every car made in the US--which is why we were making more cars in Canada than in Michigan and Ohio. (Canada has much higher tax rates.)
A mandate is the most conservative way to have universal healthcare--if you smoke, drink to excess & have other bad habits, you pay more.
Bigger print. Makes sense.
Bring in ObamaCare...end Medicaid/Medicare and uneccessary Emergency Room visits, will save lives and billions of $$...THINK ABOUT IT!