Rick Santorum’s Cynicism: A Fine Day To Discuss The Value Of The Affordable Care Act
This morning brings some sad news, that Rick Santorum’s daughter, Bella, has been hospitalized in Philadelphia. The child has Trisomy 18, a particularly heartbreaking genetic condition.
I do not share the opinion that it is distasteful to discuss the political issues surrounding a tragedy, that there should be some kind of grace period. If you want to argue for or against gun control in the wake of a school shooting, have at it. Why should the very day an issue gets maximum media saturation be the one day we can’t discuss its political contours?
Point being, I think it’s okay to point out that under the Affordable Care Act, insurers can’t deny coverage to children with a preexisting condition or disability.
[T]he law actually prevents insurance carriers from denying coverage to individuals with pre-existing conditions (and disabilities), prohibits health plans from putting a lifetime dollar limit on benefits and offers new options for long-term care. This is why groups like the American Association of People with Disabilities, National Organization For Rare Disorders, and The Arc of the United States not only support the law, but have filed an amicus brief in its defense.
And it’s equally okay to remind voters that Santorum, in an act of startling cynicism, continues to equate the ACA with socialism, even suggesting that it would lead to the death of his daughter. His claim that he’s “fighting for Bella and other children like her” — and, by extension, proponents of the ACA are not — is spurious.
By all accounts, Santorum’s daughter has beaten the odds. She’s gotten marvelous healthcare. I have yet to encounter a decent justification from either Santorum or his fellow candidates for denying the nation’s children the same opportunity.
By: Elon Green, Washington Monthly Political Animal, January 29, 2012
After Supporting Health Care Mandate In 1994, Santorum Now Says He Never Supported Mandates
Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum (R) stepped up his criticism of GOP presidential primary front-runner Mitt Romney on CBS’ Face The Nation this morning, slamming Romney for providing “the basis” for the Affordable Care Act when he signed a comprehensive health reform law while he was governor of Massachusetts.
In addition to providing a model for national health care reform, RomneyCare is to blame for raising taxes, rising health care costs, and, worst of all, Santorum said, an individual mandate requiring people to buy health insurance. That, Santorum said, represented a government intrusion into health care that he never has and never could support:
SANTORUM: Gov. Romney’s plan, as much as he’d like to say it’s not, was the basis of Obamacare. He was for an individual mandate, he was for government top-down control of the health care system in Massachusetts. And it’s led to the highest cost health care in the nation in Massachusetts, it’s led to higher taxes. … It is an absolute disaster. […]
He would not have the clear record that I have…of being for government out of the health care business, being for a plan that is bottom-up, private sector health care reform. Unlike other folks in this race, I’ve had a consistent record over that time of not being for individual mandates. … He has been for individual mandates, I have not.
Watch it:
As Igor Volsky reported last week, however, Santorum supported an individual health insurance mandate during his 1994 Senate campaign, shortly after a host of Senate Republicans had offered the mandate as an alternative to President Clinton’s health reform plan.
And aside from the fact that RomneyCare did lay the groundwork for the Affordable Care Act — Romney repeatedly touted his plan as a national model before the ACA passed — Santorum’s criticisms are largely off-base. Massachusetts’ health costs are rising, but at rates comparable to the national average, and the cost of some premiums has fallen dramatically. Meanwhile, the state has the lowest uninsured rate in the nation, with just 4.7 percent of Bay Staters lacking health insurance.
By: Travis Waldron, Think Progress, January 15, 2012
“Breathtaking Dishonesty”: Romney Revives The Big Republican Lie
As Mitt Romney and the GOP’s merry band of private-equity foes take their delicious war over “good” vs. “bad” capitalism to South Carolina, don’t expect Romney’s triumphalist New Hampshire victory speech to shut his rivals down. With the slugfest heading south, the real shocker is that Romney’s chipper “I like being able to fire people” line — which will now become permanent background noise in our world, like the hum of the air conditioning — is actually much worse in context than it was when taken out.
Aficionados of this Romney gaffe know by now that Romney was referring to being able to “fire” health insurance companies that aren’t providing adequate care and coverage. But the terrible fraud in his explanation hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves.
“I don’t want to live in a world where we have Obamacare telling us which insurance we have to have, which doctor we can have, which hospital we go to,” Romney said in a rare news conference Monday afternoon to clarify his remarks. “I believe in the setting as I described this morning, where people are able to choose their own doctor, choose their own insurance company. If they don’t like their insurance company or their provider, they can get rid of it.”
On Tuesday he added: “I was talking about, as you know, insurance companies. We’d all like to get rid of our insurance companies — don’t want Obama to tell us we can’t.”
Romney’s dishonesty here is breathtaking. I used to think Republicans had taken chutzpah to unsurpassable new heights when they refused on principle to lift the debt ceiling last summer – despite having passed the Paul Ryan budget, which added more than $5 trillion in debt over the next decade.
But Romney may have topped that. He’s saying that President Obama’s Affordable Care Act — which offers people precisely the choice among competing private insurers that Romney’s own health-care reform did in Massachusetts — is instead some cartoon version of socialized medicine.
It’s a blatant falsehood. The Big Republican Lie.
Now, if Rick Perry had said this, you might say that the man just doesn’t know whereof he speaks. When Rush Limbaugh makes such bogus claims, you put it down to the ravings of an entertainer and propagandist. But Romney is a smart man. He’s also supposed to be a serious man, not a huckster. He knows better. Yet he’s made these outrageous false claims repeatedly. So this is a conscious, premeditated Big Lie.
What should we make of all this?
Let’s review. A candidate makes an obviously insensitive, unattractive remark that makes him sound like a callous, coldhearted boss, but the remark has been taken out of context. That “fire” sound bite will nonetheless become a staple of rivals’ ads and part of the Democratic onslaught if Romney is the nominee. (Look for it to be paired with Mike Huckabee’s perfect quip from 2008 that Romney “looks like the guy who fired you.”)
A fairminded citizen might feel a pang of sympathy for a politician who has to watch every word, lest it be taken out of context and turned against him. That’s why we get such robotic candidates and officials, after all.
But such sympathy dries up when it turns out that Romney’s actual meaning involves the Big Republican Lie on health care. When, in fact, Obama’s law offers exactly the same choices, via exactly the same kind of insurance exchanges, that Romney brought to Massachusetts.
Here’s another wrinkle. Romney’s passage of that health-care law – the one he’s mischaracterizing when he’s not busy running away from it – was a landmark achievement. He was the only governor who passed a bipartisan universal health-care bill. Facts are facts.
So what are we supposed to think of this man?
Here’s what we know. Romney will very casually tell the Big Lie if he thinks it will help him win. He’ll also work to enact universal health coverage if he thinks it’s a sensible path for his constituents and serves his own political ambitions once in office. Does this make him shameless and untrustworthy? A problem-solver? Both? Is belief in his own claim on power the only core conviction we can count on from Mitt Romney? Is any other presidential contender — or president — any different?
Just some questions to mull as you microwave the popcorn and settle down to watch the 30-minute video on Romney’s time at Bain in the days ahead. In the meantime, if the dictionary defines “misfire” as “to fail to ignite when expected,” and “spitfire” means “a quick tempered or highly emotional person,” I’m betting that by the time South Carolina votes, we’ll be looking at a “Mittfire” — a candidate whose loose talk on firing means he hasn’t wrapped things up when he’d hoped and who’s hopping mad about it. There’s a twist or turn left in the Grand Old Party yet.
By: Matt Miller, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, January 11, 2012
The Republican Alternative To “ObamaCare” Is ObamaCare
On Saturday, David Fahrenthold wrote that “more than a year after Republicans first pledged to ‘repeal and replace’ President Obama’s new health-care law, the GOP is still struggling to answer a basic question. Replace it . . . with what?”
This shouldn’t be such a problem. Health care is a big issue. It’s been around a long time. The Republican Party should, in 2011, have a position on it. To understand why it doesn’t, it’s worth reading Newt Gingrich’s April 2006 comments on then-Gov. Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts reforms.
“The most exciting development of the past few weeks is what has been happening up in Massachusetts,” wrote Gingrich, or someone speaking for Gingrich, in his “Newt Notes” newsletter. “The health bill that Governor Romney signed into law this month has tremendous potential to effect major change in the American health system. We agree entirely with Governor Romney and Massachusetts legislators that our goal should be 100% insurance coverage for all Americans. … Individuals who can afford to purchase health insurance and simply choose not to place an unnecessary burden on a system that is on the verge of collapse; these free-riders undermine the entire health system by placing the onus of responsibility on taxpayers.”
In 2006, in other words, the Republican Party had an alternative to Obamacare. The only problem? It was Obamacare.
Between 1990 and 2007, the reigning Republican theory of health-care reform was that instead of handing the health-care system over to the government, they would put private insurers and personal responsibility at the core of their health-care reforms. During this period, everyone from Bob Dole to Jim DeMint to the Heritage Foundation endorsed this approach. But then Democrats, looking for a compromise, endorsed those same plans. And then Republicans, rather than pocketing the policy win, ran from their own ideas.
But insofar as the Republican Party had a plan for health-care reform, the individual mandate was it. That’s why Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Tim Pawlenty, and Jon Huntsman either passed, endorsed, or expressed openness to an individual mandate. And that’s why Romney hasn’t paid for his plan: Almost every other serious candidate for the Republican nomination supported an individual mandate, too. It’s hard for Gingrich to take a clear shot at Romney for proposing what Gingrich called “the most exciting development” in health-care reform.
It’s also why the Republican Party can’t figure out an alternative to the Affordable Care Act. The Affordable Care Act was their alternative. Now they need an alternative to the alternative. But there are only so many policy approaches that make sense as an answer to our health-care problems. And Republicans have pretty much run out of them.
By: Ezra Klein, The Washington Post, December 27, 2011
The GOP Policy Problem
Ezra Klein has an excellent point to make about Republicans and policy this morning. He’s writing about how many policies Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich once supported that turned out to be Kenyan socialism once Barack Obama adopted them. Jonathan Cohn has yet another excellent example: Newt was an enthusiastic backer (with John Kerry!) of comparative effectiveness research — that is, having the government collect data about which medical treatments actually work. That was way back in 2008, but as Cohn points out, after it became part of ACA a few months later it immediately became evil socialist rationing, something that Gingrich can now get in trouble for with conservatives on the campaign trail.
Klein concludes that the reason that Romney and Gingrich are stuck with having supported so many now-forbidden policy is because they are “wonks.” I think that’s too strong, however, or perhaps not strong enough, depending on your perspective. Klein provides a long list of Republicans who once supported an individual mandate on health insurance, but surely they weren’t all wonks? Nope. Most of them were just Republicans following the standard Republican line of the time, a line that was good enough until Barack Obama and the Democrats adopted a kitchen sink to health care reform and tossed in any decent idea that they could find (remember all that rhetoric back then about all the Republican-sponsored ideas included in ACA? It was true!).
No wonder that House Republicans are spending much of their energy repealing non-existent regulations about farm dust or affirming the US motto. Or why Romney’s entire foreign policy program appears to be a pledge not to go on an “apology tour” that never happened. It’s a lot easier to be certain that you always completely oppose the president’s program when you write your own fictional version of the president.
But Klein’s conclusion is right on the mark:
At the end of the day, the GOP will nominate somebody for president…The bigger problem will be if that individual wins. At that point, they’ll need actual solutions for the problems facing the nation. But the Republican Party has ruled out an individual mandate to help with health-care reform, a cap-and-trade program to mitigate global warming and speed the development of renewable energy options, tax increases to help reduce the deficit, and stimulus to help boost the economy. That leaves a potential GOP president with a lot of problems to solve, but few workable policies with which to solve them.
Well, they still have tax cuts for rich people.
By: Jonathan Bernstein, Washington Monthly, December 14, 2011
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