“Let The Policy Back-Tracking Begin”: Paul Ryan Says Romneycare Is an Unsustainable “Fatal Conceit”
As I noted earlier, Mitt Romney’s new vice presidential pick is “not a fan,” to use Paul Ryan’s words, of the former Massachusetts governor’s signature legislative accomplishment.
Buzzfeed’s Andrew Kaczynski dug up last week a 2010 Ryan appearance on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal where he blasted the Massachusetts healthcare overhaul, which Romney oversaw as governor, as “a fatal conceit.”
Asked if he thought Romneycare (upon which Obamacare was based) works, Ryan responded:
Not well, no. Actually, I’m not a fan of the system. … I’ve got some relatives up there in Massachusetts. My uncle’s a cardiologist in Boston and I’ve talked to a lot of healthcare folks up there. What’s happening now is because costs are getting out of control, premiums are increasing in Massachusetts and now you have a bureaucracy that is having to put all these cost controls and now rationing on the system. So people in Massachusetts are saying ‘yes we have virtually universal healthcare’—I think it’s 96 or 98 percent insured. But they see the system bursting by the seams. They see premium increases, rationing and benefit cuts, and so they’re frustrated with this system. … They see how this idea of having the government be the sole, you know, single regulator of health insurance, defining what kind of health insurance you can have, and then an individual mandate—it is fatal conceit. These kinds of systems, as we’re now seeing in Massachusetts are unsustainable.
Of course it’s standard operating procedure that vice presidential picks have policy differences with the top of the ticket. See George H.W. Bush and “voodoo economics,” for example. But this disagreement is more pronounced because to date Romney has run a campaign light on policy details (the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein memorably described Romney’s agenda as being less actual policy proposals and “more like simulacra of policy proposals. They look, from far away, like policy proposals. … But read closely, they are not policy proposals. They do not include the details necessary to judge Romney’s policy ideas. In many cases, they don’t contain any details at all.”) In a stroke Mitt Romney made Paul Ryan the functional policy director of his campaign, making sharp policy disagreements like this one more than ordinarily salient. By the same token, it will be interesting to watch the conservative reaction as Ryan is forced to correct himself on this and any other areas of disagreement with the top of the ticket. Given the extent to which his nomination is meant to pacify a querulous base a muzzled or repentant Ryan could prove problematic.
(On the other hand, Romneycare’s broad unpopularity with his party—see the uproar this week when a Romney spokeswoman spoke positively of it—has left him largely quiet on the law’s virtues so maybe “fatal conceit” will become the campaign’s official policy position on the law.)
One other point worth mentioning on Ryan and healthcare costs: It’s interesting that he criticized cost controls since they are notably absent from his Medicare overhaul scheme. While his plan would lower spending it does so not by controlling costs but by shifting the cost from the government to senior citizens. What it does do, however, is keep the Obamacare Medicare cuts … which Romney grimly denounced in introducing Ryan. I guess that’s another area where we can look forward to a little policy back-tracking.
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, August 11, 2012
“A Slave To The Right Wing”: Romney’s Health Care Dilemma Returns
Mitt Romney has been so busy securing his Republican base that he hasn’t had time to court independent voters, the ones who will actually decide this election. But now, probably by accident, he has an opportunity to show them that he’s something other than a slave to his party’s right wing. Will he take it?
When Romney spokesperson Andrea Saul committed the apparently unpardonable sin of praising the health care law Mitt Romney passed as governor of Massachusetts, was she making a horrible mistake that made everyone in Romney headquarters gasp in horror, or was she just reflecting what her candidate actually believes? The answer to that question would tell us where Romney is going to go from here on health care, and whether he may at long last try to find some issue on which he can convince voters he’s something more than a vessel for whatever his party’s right wing wants to do to the country.
Most everyone, myself included, initially assumed that Saul just spoke out of turn. After all, Romney had been trying to avoid any discussion of health care all through the primaries. And from a logical standpoint, there really is no good argument for him to make. Since what Romney did in Massachusetts and what President Obama did with the Affordable Care Act are identical in their major features, either they were both wise policy moves or they were both horrible mistakes, but it just can’t be the case that one was great and the other was a nightmare. That is, in fact, the argument Romney makes when he’s forced to talk about the Massachusetts reform, but you can tell he realizes how absurd what he’s saying is, and he wants to change the subject as soon as possible.
But Noam Scheiber argues that it’s oversimplified to just say that Romney has turned his back on Romneycare in order to assure Republicans that he hates Obamacare as much as they do:
As we await the Romney campaign’s decision about Saul’s fate, it’s worth reflecting on one under-reported aspect of this latest conservative blow-up: Saul was saying precisely what her superiors in the Romney campaign believe, not least of them Mitt Romney.
I spent a lot of time talking to Romney campaign officials while reporting my recent profile of Stuart Stevens, his chief strategist. The unmistakable impression I got from them is that, to this day, Romney remains extremely proud of having passed health care reform in Massachusetts.
And why wouldn’t he be? He approached a difficult problem, then came up with a solution acceptable to both parties, and by all accounts the resulting policy has been a success. There are only a small number of uninsured people left in Massachusetts, and the reform is widely popular within the state. It was without a doubt the most significant accomplishment of Romney’s one term as governor. The fact that he is running a campaign for president in which he dares not mention the best thing he did in the one job he had that was something of a preparation for the job he wants is quite insane.
Of course, it’s one thing for him to be justifiably proud of Romneycare, and it’s another for him to actually talk about it on the campaign trail. If he were to do that, it would require two things he has little desire to do: angering his base, and admitting, at least tacitly, that Barack Obama actually did something right. The former is really the biggest problem; there has not been a single occasion during this campaign (or the one he ran in 2008, for that matter), when Mitt Romney has said or done anything he thought might get the right wing of the Republican party upset. The chances that he’ll start now are slim to none.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, August 10, 2012
The “War on Religion”: GOP Still Placating The Hard Core Base
Is anyone who doesn’t already hate Obama for the usual right-wing reasons really going to believe the new Romney ad, that Obama’s health-care law wages a “war on religion”? I doubt many people will. It’s just right-wing fever-swamp rhetoric that I think your average person will, in his or her bones, recognize as such, because we’ve now reached the point in history where we’ve heard a lot of this, and it no longer shocks or traduces the way it once did.
Romney is still placating the hard-core GOP base. It’s getting a little late for that, isn’t? August isn’t really the time to be trying to nail down the scary-lazy-black-people and the Democrats-hate-God voting blocs. August is when you start making your pitch to swing voters.
This is starting, just starting, to remind me of the Rick Lazio 2000 Senate campaign against Hillary, when he, under the brilliant hand of Mike Murphy, made a crucial mistake conservatives are naturally prone to make. He confused “regular New Yorkers” with “right-wing Hillary haters” and thought they were functionally the same thing. Thus he couldn’t for the life of him understand why middle-of-the-road New Yorkers weren’t impressed and persuaded when he and the state GOP accused the First Lady of the United States of sympathizing with the terrorists who blew up the USS Cole. The Romney camp is edging into the same territory.
If Romney wants to talk about wars on religion, I really hope he names Paul Ryan as his veep. The Catholic Bishops called the Ryan budget “immoral.” Unfortunately, the Democrats probably wouldn’t even point this out, wouldn’t want to lean on the bishops. And this raises a problem with today’s Democratic Party.
I’d love to see the party become less skittish about using religion to defend and support its policies. Many elected Democrats, indeed most, are religious people. Obviously, their religious beliefs inform their political views, and vice versa. They ought to be more comfortable talking about it.
Why should Republicans be the only ones to invoke Jesus, and only for conservative reasons and ends? I think it would be delicious if Democrats started quoting more Scripture in behalf of liberalism. After all, a lot of Scripture is liberalism. I’m not religious myself, but I think it’s a shame that liberalism is so guardedly secular.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, August 9, 2012
“The Last Nutball Standing”: Dancing With The Mitt That Brung Ya
Conservatives picked him, and now they have to live with him.
In the early days of the 2012 Republican primaries, many thoughtful commentators took the position that it was simply impossible for Mitt Romney to win his party’s nomination. Despite all his evident strengths as a candidate—money, the most professionally run campaign in the group, the endorsement of many establishment figures—Romney simply would not find a way to get past the fact that as governor of Massachusetts he had passed a health care plan that became the model for the Affordable Care Act, which Republicans had come to see as the very embodiment of evil in the modern world. The party’s base would never abide it.
Yet he did. Without all that much trouble too. And he didn’t deal with the health care issue through some brilliant strategy, either. He made no dramatic mea culpa, and never repudiated Romneycare, at least not directly. Whenever he was asked about it he would give a convoluted and utterly unconvincing argument about how what he did in Massachusetts was great, though of course it shouldn’t be applied anywhere else, and even though the ACA is almost exactly the same as Romneycare, the latter was a pragmatic and effective policy solution while the former is an abomination so horrific that putting a copy of the bill in the same room as an American flag could cause said flag to burst into flames and be sucked through a demonic portal to the very pits of hell. Democrats shook their heads at the hypocrisy and smiled at Romney’s pain, while Republicans narrowed their eyes and listened skeptically. I feel fairly confident that there was not a single person anywhere who upon hearing Romney try to make these absurd distinctions responded with, “Well that makes sense—I’m convinced.”
And amazingly, it almost seems as if Romney thought he could get through the rest of the campaign without this coming up. Yet come up it did, when his chief campaign flak Andrea Saul responded to an ad from pro-Obama super PAC Priorities USA that attacks Romney with the story of the spouse of a worker laid off from a Bain Capital-owned company who died without health insurance by saying, “To that point, if people had been in Massachusetts, under Governor Romney’s health care plan, they would have had health care.” Saul was right, of course—in Massachusetts, as in the rest of the country after the ACA fully takes effect in 2014, losing your job doesn’t mean losing your coverage. But conservatives became apoplectic that the Romney campaign would tout Romney’s greatest achievement as governor and imply that people having secure health insurance might actually be a good thing. The less thoughtful among them insisted that Romney and his team need to be “housebroken.”
All of which, I’m sure, has caused no small amount of panic at Romney headquarters. As I keep saying, it’s just incredible that Romney still has to invest so much energy in keeping his restive base in line. By this time he’s supposed to be going after independent voters, but he can’t, because every time he turns around the right has found a new reason to be mad at him.
But really, Republicans have no one to blame but themselves. Just look at the desiccated husk of a man they’ve turned their nominee into, a candidate terrified of his own shadow, devoid of anything resembling principle, so frantic to morph into whatever anyone wants him to be that there’s barely anything left of him at all. And it isn’t as though he was imposed on them or something–they picked him. Granted, he was running against a truly remarkable collection of nutballs and buffoons; imagine being a Republican and having to explain to someone a few years from now how it came to pass that at various times, your party’s front-running candidate for the presidency of the United States was Sarah Palin, Donald Trump, Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, and Newt Gingrich. But still. In the end Republicans went with Mitt Romney. He’s what they chose, and they should have known that the guy they’re looking at is exactly what they’d get.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, August 9, 2012
“Romney And His Fictional Obama”: A Man Who Exists Only In The Imagination Of Mitt’s Ad Makers
Here’s a chance for all who think Obamacare is a socialist Big Government scheme to put their money where their ideology is: If you truly hate the Affordable Care Act, you must send back any of those rebate checks you receive from your insurance companies thanks to the new law.
This is just common sense. If you think free enterprise should be liberated from Washington’s interference, what right does Uncle Sam have to tell the insurers they owe you a better deal? Keeping those refunds will make you complicit with Leviathan.
And here’s a challenge to Mitt Romney: You are running a deceitful ad about waivers the Obama administration has yet to issue based on rules allowing governors to operate their welfare-to-work programs more effectively. Will you please stop talking about your devotion to states’ rights?
Up until now, you were the guy who said that wisdom on matters related to social programming (including health insurance) lies with state governments. Five governors, including two of your fellow Republicans, thought they had a better way to make welfare reform work. The Department of Health and Human Services responded by proposing to give states more latitude. Isn’t that what honoring the good judgment of state governments is all about?
Oh, yes, and if Romney thinks President Obama is gutting welfare reform, I anxiously await his criticism of Brian Sandoval of Nevada and Gary R. Herbert of Utah, GOP governors who requested waivers. If Romney means what he says, doesn’t he have to condemn those who asked Obama to do what Obama did?
Political commentary these days is obsessed with the triviality of this campaign. Most of it is rooted in the refusal of conservatives to be candid about the implications of how their beliefs and commitments would affect the choices they would have government make — and how they differ from the president’s.
In Romney’s case, this often requires him to invent an Obama who exists only in the imagination of his ad makers. So they take Obama’s statements, clip out relevant sentences and run ads attacking some strung-together words that have a limited connection to what the president said. In the welfare ad, Romney lies outright.
But this is part of a larger pattern on the right, illustrated most tellingly by conservative rhetoric around the Affordable Care Act. In going after Obamacare, conservatives almost never talk about the specific provisions of the law. They try to drown it in anti-government rhetoric. “Help us defeat Obamacare,” Romney said after the Supreme Court declared the law constitutional. “Help us defeat the liberal agenda that makes government too big, too intrusive, and is killing jobs across this great country.”
Well, the new law does intrude directly in the insurance market. It requires that at least 85 percent of large-group premiums and 80 percent of small-group and individual premiums be spent directly on clinical services and improving the quality of health care. Imagine the radicalism: The government is telling insurance companies that they must spend most of the money they take in on actual health care for the people and businesses paying the premiums.
If the insurers spend below those levels, they have to refund the difference. According to Health and Human Services, 12.8 million Americans will get $1.1 billion in rebates. That comes to an average rebate of $151 per household. In 12 states, the rebates will average $300 or more.
Here’s your chance, conservatives. Big, bad government is forcing those nice insurance companies to give people a break. From what you say, you see this as socialism, a case of the heavy hand of Washington meddling with the right of contract. You cannot possibly keep this money. So stand up for those oppressed insurers and give them their rebates back!
As for the waivers on welfare, Romney’s position is dispiriting. Here’s a former governor whose Massachusetts health-care plan — the one that resembles Obamacare — was made possible by federal waivers; who, like other governors, wanted flexibility to do welfare reform his way; and who has said he would roll back Obamacare through the waiver process he now assails. He’s turning away from what he claims to believe about state-level innovation for the sake of a cheap and misleading campaign point.
I’d also be curious to know whether Romney got a rebate on his health insurance premiums courtesy of Obamacare and whether he plans to return it. But given his attitude toward disclosure, we’ll probably never find out.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, August 8, 2012
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