“In An Awkward Spot”: How Mitt Romney Advocated Obamacare And Lied About It
In 2009, Mitt Romney had a problem. He was running for the Republican presidential nomination, and the towering achievement of his governorship in Massachusetts — health-care reform — had been embraced by President Obama. Romneycare played almost no role in Romney’s 2008 presidential run, but the emergence of the issue onto the national agenda threatened to link Romney with a president Republicans had already come to loathe.
His solution was simple. He seized upon the one major difference between his plan and Obama’s, which was that Obama favored a public health insurance option. The public plan had commanded enormous public attention, and Romney used to it frame Masscare as a conservative reform relying on private health insurance, and against Obama’s proposal to create a government plan that, Romney claimed, would balloon into a massive entitlement. Andrew Kaczynski collects several televised appearances and one op-ed in which Romney holds up Masscare as a national model.
This tactic backfired when Obama had to jettison the public plan, and Republicans came to focus on the individual mandate as the locus of evil in Obamacare. What was once a Republican idea in good standing was now, suddenly, unconstitutional and the greatest threat to freedom in American history.
This left Romney in an awkward spot.
It’s hard to run for president as the advocate of an idea that your party considers the greatest threat to freedom in history. His response was to simply revise the past, much as he did with abortion. Romney now claimed he had never advocated a federal version of his Masscare program. Here’s Romney at the December 11 GOP presidential debate:
Speaker Gingrich said that he was for a federal individual mandate. That’s something I’ve always opposed. What we did in our state was designed by the people in our state for the needs of our state. You believe in the 10th Amendment. I believe in the 10th Amendment. The people of Massachusetts favor our plan three to one. They don’t like it, they can get rid of it. (COUGH) That’s the great thing about (COUGH) a democracy, where individuals under the 10th Amendment have the power to craft their own solutions.
The coughs are in the original transcript, for what it’s worth. I’ll leave it to the psychiatrists to say whether we ought to read anything into them.
And here’s Romney at a January 23 debate:
My health care plan, by the way, is one that under our Constitution we’re allowed to have. The people in our state chose a plan which I think is working for our state.
At the time we crafted it, I was asked time and again, “Is this something that you would have the federal government do?” I said absolutely not.
I do not support a federal mandate. I do not support a federal one-size-fits-all plan. I believe in the Constitution.
This is clearly untrue. Romney, as Kaczynski has shown, repeatedly held up the Massachusetts model in 2009. For instance, from the USA Today op-ed:
There’s a better way. And the lessons we learned in Massachusetts could help Washington find it. ..
For health care reform to succeed in Washington, the president must finally do what he promised during the campaign: Work with Republicans as well as Democrats.
Massachusetts also proved that you don’t need government insurance. Our citizens purchase private, free-market medical insurance. There is no “public option.” …
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.
The remarkable thing is that none of Romney’s opponents challenged these demonstrably false claims. If you check the transcripts of the debates, Romney simply lies about what he advocated, and then everybody lets it go.
Among other things, this underscores the sheer incompetence of his opposition. Kaczynski is an excellent researcher, but it’s not as if he had to comb the ends of the Earth to find these nuggets. He culled them from such sources as USA Today and Meet the Press. Every opposing campaign either failed to look up this basic stuff or failed to train the candidate to understand it. Romney is now on the verge of escaping with the party nomination having embraced a program his party considers inimical to freedom itself and blatantly lied about having done so without any major opponents pointing this out. It’s pretty incredible.
By: Jonathan Chait, Daily Intel, March 5, 2012
“Lessons Of A Severe Conservative”: Mitt Romney Urged President Obama To Propose Individual Mandate
Andrew Kaczynski digs up a remarkable July 2009 op-edfrom Mitt Romney in which Romney not only brags about the effectiveness of the individual mandate in Massachusetts, but urges President Obama to support it at the federal level:
Because of President Obama’s frantic approach, health care has run off the rails. For the sake of 47 million uninsured Americans, we need to get it back on track.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.
And what were those lessons?
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.
That, my friends, is the individual mandate. And Mitt was proud of it:
The Massachusetts reform aimed at getting virtually all our citizens insured. In that, it worked: 98% of our citizens are insured, 440,000 previously uninsured are covered and almost half of those purchased insurance on their own, with no subsidy.
And if President Obama had been willing to move forward without the public option (which he was), then Mitt Romney said he was ready to move forward with a national plan:
Republicans will join with the Democrats if the president abandons his government insurance plan, if he endeavors to craft a plan that does not burden the nation with greater debt, if he broadens his scope to reduce health costs for all Americans, and if he is willing to devote the rigorous effort, requisite time and bipartisan process that health care reform deserves.
And, as Mitt Romney made clear at the top of his op-ed, the plan he supported was one built around what he said worked in Massachusetts—including the individual mandate.
Yet despite his clear embrace of the individual mandate as part of federal health care reform, Mitt Romney has faced such a weak set of rival candidates that not a single one of them has brought this up in the twenty Republican debates.
But as fortunate as Mitt Romney has been to face such a staggeringly incompetent Republican field, he won’t be so lucky next fall. And you can bet your bottom dollar that the very first time he tries to attack President Obama over health care reform in the debates, he’s going to get this thrown right back in his face. And he’ s not going to like how it turns out.
By: Jed Lewison, Daily Kos, March 2, 2012
“Mitt’s Legacy”: Health Reform Worked In Massachusetts
On February 8 the Center for American Progress hosted an event featuring Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley, where she discussed the success of the Massachusetts health care reform law signed by former Gov. Mitt Romney (R) in 2006.
Attorney General Coakley discussed the framework of the law and explained how it’s played an essential role in providing unparalleled access to health care coverage for Massachusetts residents. She and CAP President Neera Tanden also discussed why the Affordable Care Act’s adoption of the Massachusetts framework fits comfortably within the United States’ constitutional authority.
In her introductory remarks, Tanden said that “the Massachusetts law, though sometimes maligned in our national debates, is actually an incredible success story, and has really demonstrated to the country how effective health care reform can be, and the Affordable Care Act can be.”
She mentioned the new CAP report “The Case for the Individual Mandate in Health Care Reform,” and said that Massachusetts’s embracing of the individual mandate in addition to its nondiscrimination over preexisting conditions has allowed its health care reform to flourish.
Flourish so much, Tanden said, that “98.1 percent of the state’s residents were insured at the end of 2010, compared to 87.5 in 2006, when the health care law started. Almost every child in the state is insured, and premiums in the individual market dropped 40 percent as the Massachusetts law was fully implemented.”
In her speech, Attorney General Coakley described the Massachusetts health care law, saying that “in some, but not all particulars, the Massachusetts Act of 2006 was really the prototype for what has become the Federal Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.” Like the Affordable Care Act, Massachusetts’ reform includes a state-operated health insurance exchange, subsidies for low- and moderate-income individuals, and a mandate that all individuals who can afford health insurance purchase coverage, or an individual mandate.
Coakley said, “The law has resulted in the highest health care access rates in the nation, it has improved both access to and affordability of health care for hundreds of thousands of residents, while maintaining a high level of quality, and I think that’s important.
“We don’t talk about quality so much, but it’s part of what we are concerned about. Access, cost, quality: Ensuring two is relatively easy, if you want to do all three, not so much. And this has been, and is still, our challenge and our goal, and as a work in progress, I think the facts demonstrate that rather than our experiment proving a risk to the rest of the country, Massachusetts as a test laboratory has a lot to offer.”
She said, “We’ve seen significant improvements in the care of our residents. From 2006 to 2010, adults from all income groups, but in particular lower-income adults, experienced a significant decline in reported unmet health care needs due to cost. … we also have seen significant overall economic benefits for our state as a result of this.”
In terms of costs, she said, “[w]e’ve seen a sharp decline in the amount of spending on the so-called ‘free care,’ [when an uninsured person visits an ER, for example, and costs get passed on to the insured in higher rates] about $300 million, and that’s 33 percent less than we spent in 2006.” And nongroup or individual insurance premiums cost 40 percent less.
Attorney General Coakley also discussed why she believes the Supreme Court will not overturn the individual mandate. Massachusetts, she said, is giving a very positive endorsement for the mandate, and it is “a constitutional act by Congress.” It would be quite surprising if the Supreme Court overturned “the 70 years of precedent that have been set” by case law establishing what Congress has constitutional authority to regulate, including commerce such as health care.
After her speech, Attorney General Coakley spoke with Tanden about health reform. In response to an audience question about the constitutionality of the mandate, Tanden said that “when you say that people have coverage when they go to the emergency room, that immediately means that they’ll be cost-shifting, and the individual mandate is just a way in which people have the same responsibility for their own health care so they’re not shifting costs anymore.”
As Attorney General Coakley asserted, Massachusetts is an essential—and the only U.S. example—of the importance of the individual mandate in ensuring affordable access to health care for all.
By: Center for American Progress, February 27, 2012
“Oop’s, He Did It Again”: When Romney Agreed With Obama On Contraception
For months, Republican presidential candidates have been eager, if not desperate, to accuse President Obama of waging a “war on religion.” Rick Perry got the ball rolling quite a while ago, but his more successful rivals have picked up on the same line.
The problem for the GOP candidates has been substantive: they knew they wanted to accuse Obama of being hostile towards faith communities, but they couldn’t explain why. Republicans saw value in the attack — the drive to paint the president as “The Other” has been a constant for four years — but they had absolutely no idea how to bolster the smear.
This week, Mitt Romney seems to have settled on a policy to match the attack: the Obama administration’s decision to require coverage of contraception as preventive care under the Affordable Care Act is, according to the former governor, an “attack on religious liberty.”
Romney told voters in Colorado yesterday that “churches and the institutions they run” will “have to provide for their employees, free of charge, contraceptives, morning-after pills — in other words abortive pills and the like — at no cost.”
As a substantive matter, Romney’s lying. The administration’s policy already exempts churches and other houses of worship and “doesn’t require any individual or employer to violate a religious belief — it simply ensures that their employees with different beliefs have the same access to birth control as all other women.”
But as a matter of consistency, Romney has another problem: he’s not only lying; he’s also denouncing Obama for adopting a policy similar to one Romney used to support.
Mitt Romney accused President Obama this week of ordering “religious organizations to violate their conscience,” referring to a White House decision that requires all health plans – even those covering employees at Catholic hospitals, charities, and colleges – to provide free birth control. But a review of Romney’s tenure as Massachusetts governor shows that he once took a similar step.
Oops.
While Romney was on the attack yesterday, condemning the idea of requiring religious institutions to provide emergency contraception, as governor, a previous iteration of Romney required all Massachusetts hospitals, including Catholic hospitals, to provide emergency contraception to rape victims.
Some Catholic leaders now point to inconsistency in Romney’s criticism of the president and characterize his new stance as politically expedient, even as they welcome it.
“The initial injury to Catholic religious freedom came not from the Obama administration but from the Romney administration,” said C.J. Doyle, executive director of the Catholic Action League of Massachusetts. “President Obama’s plan certainly constitutes an assault on the constitutional rights of Catholics, but I’m not sure Governor Romney is in a position to assert that, given his own very mixed record on this.” […]
“Governor Romney afterwards lamented that and campaigned around the country as someone in favor of religious freedom and traditional morality,” Doyle said. “He is very consistent at working both sides of the street on the same issue at the same time. His record on this issue has been one of very cynical and tactical manipulation.”
It’s the latest in a series of examples of Romney 2.0 interfering with the ambitions of Romney 5.0.
Why, And How, Mitt Romney Quit In ’06
My colleagues Josh Kraushaar and Alex Roarty have taken note of ex-Sen. Rick Santorum’s big-time loss in his 2006 bid for re-election — and rightly so, given just how badly Sen. Bob Casey beat Santorum across virtually all demographic groups and geographic areas.
But Mitt Romney’s re-election bid — or lack thereof — deserves its own scrutiny. Romney said Sunday morning he didn’t seek another term as governor of Massachusetts in 2006 because it wouldn’t have been consistent with the reason he ran in the first place.
“I went to Massachusetts to make it different. I didn’t go there to begin a political career, running time and time again. I made a difference. I put in place the things I wanted to do. I listed out the accomplishments we wanted to pursue in our administration. There were 100 things we wanted to do. Those things I pursued aggressively. Some we won. Some we didn’t,” Romney said. “Run again? That would be about me. I was trying to help get the state in best shape as I possibly could. Left the world of politics, went back into business.”
But there are plenty of signs Romney was contemplating another term before he announced he’d skip the race in December 2005.
Romney’s advisors were putting together plans for a potential re-election bid, the Boston Globe reported in November 2005. His campaign ran several radio ads touting his legislative success in late May, he ran a newspaper insert in the Globe in July, and his campaign polled the race in March, a poll that showed him trailing Reilly by a statistically insignificant margin. He even traded barbs with Attorney General Tom Reilly (D) over cost recovery for the Big Dig and welcomed former Deputy U.S. Attorney Deval Patrick — who would eventually beat Reilly and win the governorship — into the race.
At the same time, his advisors were denying his interest in a 2008 White House bid, apparently to keep his options open at home. Romney’s former chief of staff, Spencer Zwick — now the campaign’s finance director — told the Globe in October that his spending “doesn’t indicate he’s running for another office besides governor.”
Romney hinted a few times that he hadn’t ruled out another bid. “We’ll both be on the same ballot,” he said of then-Sen. Ted Kennedy, who was up for re-election himself in 2006. Most press accounts in early 2005 characterize Romney as intending to run for a second term, though they note his national ambitions.
Romney delayed a decision on whether he’d seek re-election until two things happened: First, he won election as head of the Republican Governors Association, a platform from which he could travel the country, introduce himself to big donors and collect favors he could later cash in. And second, he signed health care legislation into law — legislation his rivals this year once believed would derail his entire bid.
(A side note: Romney spent most of Fall 2005 urging the legislature to pass a comprehensive reform measure. Romney ended up signing the bill in April 2006, after vetoing several provisions and after he’d said he wouldn’t run for another term)
Then again, it would have been hard for Romney to mount a White House bid having just lost re-election, and Romney’s decision could have become much clearer given the public polls he was seeing. A State House News poll, conducted by KRC/Communications Research just a month before Romney announced publicly he wouldn’t seek a second term, showed him losing to Reilly (D) by 16 points. Just 42 percent of Bay Staters said Romney was doing an excellent or good job, while 53 percent said his performance was poor or below average (Hotline subscribers can see the full poll here, from our archives). Another poll, conducted by UMass in September 2005, showed Romney trailing Reilly by 15 points.
Those polls aren’t proof that Romney was willing to give up on the governorship. But Romney’s intentions to skip a re-election fight were pretty clear from the beginning. A review of Hotline archives shows the Massachusetts press corps taking then-Lt. Gov. Kerry Healey seriously as a candidate, and political insiders expressed surprise when businessman Charles Baker took himself out of the running in late August — three and a half months before Romney ruled out another bid.
Romney, with the help of former consultant Mike Murphy, began seriously exploring a presidential bid early in 2005 (In an ironic twist, Healey brought on Stuart Stevens — Romney’s lead strategist this year — to help her eventually unsuccessful bid to succeed her boss). He went so far as to promise Healey to endorse her if he decided not to seek another term, as early as June 2005.
Despite his insistence that he’d accomplished what he set out to do, Romney’s team, and the governor himself, left the door wide open to a re-election bid in 2006. It was only after he set himself up to build a national foundation — and after polls suggested he would end up as Santorum eventually did — that Romney made public his decision to take a pass.
By: Reid Wilson, The National Journal, January 10, 2012
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