“The Other Mitt”: No Health Insurance? Romney Says “Freeloading” In The ER Is Now All Good
Whether you support the candidacy of Mitt Romney or not, we all should be able to agree that his experience as Governor of Massachusetts—at the time when the first universal healthcare law in the nation was conceived and placed into operation—makes him something of an expert on the subject of health care economics.
And that is precisely what makes his comments during last night’s edition of “60 Minutes” all the more bizarre.
When asked whether the nation has a responsibility to provide health care to the 50 million Americans who do not currently have coverage, the Governor responded;
“Well, we do provide care for people who don’t have insurance. If someone has a heart attack, they don’t sit in their apartment and die. We pick them up in an ambulance, and take them to the hospital, and give them care. And different states have different ways of providing for that care.”
Never mind that ‘60 Minutes’ interviewer Scott Pelly was quick to accurately point out that ER care is the most expensive form of treatment that one can access. What is far more interesting is that the remark so clearly puts Governor Romney at odds with the other candidate seeking the presidency—and I don’t mean Barack Obama.
I refer, of course, to the ‘other’ Mitt who seems to come and go at various moments in the campaign, offering up direct contradictions to the positions of the Mitt Romney we watched last night on the CBS news show.
You see, it was the ‘other’ Mitt who said during a 2010 interview over at MSNBC—
“It doesn’t make a lot of sense for us to have millions and millions of people who have no health insurance and yet who can go to the emergency room and get entirely free care for which they have no responsibility.”
And it was the ’other’ Mitt who told Glenn Beck in a 2007 interview—
“When they show up at the hospital, they get care. They get free care paid for by you and me. If that’s not a form of socialism, I don’t know what is. ”
Apparently, when 2002 Mitt Romney decided to divorce himself and split into two, distinct entities, the ‘other’ Mitt Romney gained possession of the Governor’s cognitive skills —including the ability to recall why Romney supported the Massachusetts universal care effort in the first place. It was, after all, 2002 Mitt Romney who often highlighted the inefficiency of emergency room care as the sole option for uninsured Massachusetts residents, allowing them to get free care while those who are insured are left to pay the bill.
It would also appear that it was the ‘other’ Mitt Romney who gained custody of the understanding that while our laws require emergency rooms to treat patients in an effort to stabilize their health condition, the law does not require the treatment that can ultimately restore all of these patients to health.
As noted by the current incarnation of the GOP candidate, when a patient turns up at the ER with severe stomach pain, that patient will be treated until her condition is stabilized. But it is the ‘other’ Mitt Romney who understands that, when the tests administered in the ER reveal that the patient has Stage One stomach cancer, it will not be up to the ER to administer the six months of chemotherapy that will be required to save the patient’s life. For that, the patient better be insured or face a truly precarious situation.
The ‘other’ Romney understands that ER care is insufficient to truly treat many patients and that, even when it was possible to get the desired result via ER care, it is the worst possible way to administer health care.
Here’s a thought—maybe current candidate Romney should consider getting rid of his failing campaign staff and see if he can entice the ‘other’ Mitt Romney to join the campaign as a strategist and adviser.
At the end of the day, I think we’d all be better off for it.
By: Rick Ungar, Contributor, Forbes, September 24, 2012
“The Grandfather Of Obamacare”: How Mitt Romney Paid For Romneycare With Federal Help
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney told Univison in an interview Wednesday that he did not mind when President Obama called him the “grandfather” of Obamacare when referring to the program Romney instituted when he was governor of Massachusetts. Quite the opposite. Romney thought other states might take a page from the Massachusetts playbook.
We didn’t have to cut Medicare by $716 billion. We didn’t raise taxes on health companies by $500 billion, as the president did. We crafted a program that worked for our state. I believe the right course for health care reform is to say for each state we’re going to give you the Medicaid dollars you’ve had in the past, plus grow them by 1 percent. And you, as the states, are now going to be given targets to move people to insurance, and you craft programs that are right for your state. Some will copy what we did; others will find better ideas.
Romney is right: The state of Massachusetts did not cut Medicare to finance health care (nor could it have, as states don’t have a say in the federally financed entitlement budget). Whereas the Affordable Care Act levies a tax on insurance companies and makers of medical devices, the Massachusetts law has no similar provision.
But could a state with a capped Medicaid budget, as Romney has proposed, copy what Romney did in Massachusetts and end up with universal coverage? Romney’s own experience suggests probably not: His state a special pot of federal money, alongside a preexisting assessment on hospitals and insurers, to expand insurance coverage to 98 percent of its population.
Way back in 1985, under then-Gov. Michael Dukakis, Massachusetts set up a program called the Uncompensated Care Pool. Much like the name suggests, the pool is used to finance health care for those without insurance. Massachusetts financed the plan largely through assessments on hospitals and insurers. Under Romney’s administration In 2004, each industry paid in about $157 million to keep the pool running. That plan still operates today — under the name Health Safety Net – and covers health care needs that Massachusetts residents cannot afford.
Since the late 1990s, Massachusetts has also received additional Medicaid funds to enroll populations that other states traditionally do not cover. In 2005, when Romney was governor, the federal aid amounted to $550 million. As former Romney adviser John McDonough explains in his book “Inside Health Policy,” the funds were crucial to laying the foundation for universal health coverage. He takes us back to 2005, when the George W. Bush administration was getting ready to end that special funding arrangement:
“In Masachusetts, $350 million is a lot of money, and the news set off alarm bells. Governor Romney reached out and formed a partnership with Senator Kennedy to scheme how to keep the extra federal dollars coming. At that moment, the state’s mundane desire to retain federal dollars merged with the policy goal of universal coverage to create a new policy imperative. Romney and Kennedy proposed that Massachusetts keep receiving the extra payments and in return the state would shift the use of those dollars [to] subsidies to help lower-income individuals purchase health insurance coverage.”
Ryan Lizza recounts a similar version of events in his New Yorker article on Romneycare. That state ultimately secured three years of additional Medicaid funding, $1.05 billion, which largely financed the Massachusetts expansion. Both accounts suggest that it was a special commitment from the federal government, rather than a capped budget, that spurred Massachusetts’ success.
Since then, employers and individuals have chipped in to keep the universal coverage program afloat. The Blue Cross Blue Shield Foundation of Massachusetts saw spending by both of those groups increase in the year after Romneycare became law, which they attribute to rising medical costs and the insurance expansion.
Five years later, it’s largely federal funding that keeps Massachusetts’ universal coverage afloat. Since 2005, the state has twice renewed that federal waiver — the one Lizza and McDonough wrote about — to provide additional Medicaid dollars to the state.
The most recent renewal was last December 2011, when the state secured $26.75 billion in federal funds over the course of three years. It will, among other programs, continue to finance the universal coverage program.
“The milestone agreement also ensures the ongoing success of Massachusetts’ historic health care reform initiative, through which more than 98 percent of the Commonwealth’s residents, and 99.8 percent of children, have health insurance,” Massachusetts Health and Human Services Secretary JudyAnn Bixby wrote at the time. “The waiver fully funds our ongoing health care reform implementation.”
So Massachusetts used not just federal Medicaid money but federal dollars above and beyond that Medicaid money to finance their health reforms. It is difficult to see how Romney’s proposal to cut Medicaid spending and hand that reduced share over to the states would allow other states to follow Massachusetts’ example. It might not even permit Massachusetts to continue following Massachusetts’ example.
By: Sarah Kliff, The Washington Post, September 21, 2012
“The Care Bears Plan”: Mitt Romney Seems Confused About Aurora
Mitt Romney may need to brush up on how he handles the topic of gun control, because what he said in an interview today with Brian Williams made no sense. Asked whether he could “see the argument” of people who question whether citizens should be allowed to buy AR-15 assault rifles or purchase 6,000 rounds of ammunition online, Romney responded:
ROMNEY: “Well this person shouldn’t have had any kind of weapons and bombs and other devices and it was illegal for him to have many of those things already. But he had them. And so we can sometimes hope that just changing the law will make all bad things go away. It won’t. Changing the heart of the American people may well be what’s essential, to improve the lots of the American people.”
Let’s break this down, piece by piece:
“Well this person shouldn’t have had any kind of weapons and bombs and other devices and it was illegal for him to have many of those things already. But he had them.”
We don’t yet know what chemicals Holmes used to make his booby traps or how he acquired them. But the weapons he used — including a semiautomatic assault rifle with a 100-round magazine — to actually shoot dozens of people were all purchased legally. That’s, uh, why he had them.
“And so we can sometimes hope that just changing the law will make all bad things go away. It won’t.”
Literally nobody believes that stricter gun-control laws would “make all bad things go away.” The point is to save lives by making it more difficult to kill people. Romney knows this — after all, he signed an assault-weapon ban into law as governor of Massachusetts.
“Changing the heart of the American people may well be what’s essential to improve the lots of the American people.”
Is that his actual plan? Let’s call up the Care Bears, maybe they can bathe all of America in the glow of their belly-rays and dissuade everyone from carrying out any more massacres.
By: Dan Amira, Daily Intel, July 25, 2012
“No Discernable Vision”: Knowing How The Economy Works Is Not Enough
This week will see the release of The 4% Solution: Unleashing the Economic Growth America Needs, a collection of essays from the George W. Bush Institute with a forward by the former president himself. It’s true that annual GDP growth never actually reached 4 percent during Bush’s two terms in office and averaged only 2.4 percent even if we generously exclude the disastrous year of 2008. But look at it this way: Who knows more about what the president ought to do about the economy than Dubya does? After all, there’s only one living American (Bill Clinton) with as much experience being president, so Bush must have the answers we need.
A ridiculous argument? Of course. That’s because experience only gets you so far. It’s obviously a good thing, all else being equal, for the president to know a lot about the economy, just as it’s a good thing for him to know a lot about foreign affairs or domestic policy. But the truth is that although the government has to solve many practical problems, and it’s important to have smart, knowledgeable people in government to work on them, the presidency is not a technocratic position.
For a long time, Republicans grasped this much better than their opponents. It was the Democrats who seemed to prize experience and knowledge, looking admiringly at candidates who understood how government works and could be counted on to manage the problem-solving efforts that would be required, while Republicans favored candidates like Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, who argued that vision was more important than skills. Yet this year, Republicans have nominated a candidate with no discernible vision whose candidacy is based almost entirely on the knowledge and management experience he supposedly gained in business.
It’s odd that for someone whose argument is so much about his preparation and experience, Mitt Romney barely ever mentions the one job he held that actually resembles being president—the governorship of Massachusetts. But we’ve had former governors who made excellent presidents and former governors who made terrible ones. And the brevity of Barack Obama’s tenure in the Senate didn’t stop him from amassing what was arguably the most impressive string of legislative victories in half a century during his first two years in office.
Mitt Romney barely bothers to persuade the voters that he will be able to get things done in Congress or that he understands foreign policy. Instead, the phrase he repeats over and over on the campaign trail is “I know how the economy works.” The current arguments over Bain Capital notwithstanding, this has been the basic rationale for Romney’s candidacy, that during his time in business he gained a body of knowledge and a unique insight that will allow him, as president, to make dramatic improvements in the economy. During the primaries he argued that this experience would make him a better president than his Republican opponents, and today he argues that it would make him a better president than Barack Obama.
But if there were a magic key to unlock spectacular growth and widely shared prosperity, you’d think we would have found it by now. There hasn’t been a president in decades, the current one included, who didn’t have lots of businesspeople working in his administration. And Barack Obama talks to corporate leaders all the time. If Romney knows something they don’t, he hasn’t told us what it is. If you read through his economic plan, you’ll find that it contains the same things Republicans always advocate: lower taxes, reduced regulations, free trade, and so on. You’ve certainly heard Romney say that his business experience helps him understand the economy. But have you ever heard him say what exactly he learned that no one else knows?
Perhaps he plans to unveil this remarkable insight once the election is over; if so, one can hope that as a patriotic American he’ll share it with the country even if he loses. Because even if it involved some policies that conservatives like, you can bet that President Obama would be happy to take the bargain if it would deliver something like the sustained 4 percent growth George W. Bush promises. If you really could create a humming economy just by cutting taxes for the wealthy and creating some “Reagan Economic Zones” (yes, that’s something Romney proposes, though he doesn’t say much about what it means), Obama would do it. The reason he doesn’t isn’t that he’s a socialist; it’s that the argument isn’t all that persuasive.
So no, Mitt Romney is not in possession of a secret that can deliver us to economic nirvana. We can try to determine whether anything less than admirable happened at Bain Capital during Romney’s time there, and if so how much responsibility he bears. But even if all those questions are answered in Romney’s favor, it wouldn’t change the fact that the policies he advocates are derived not from his experience but from his politics and his moral perspective, just as Barack Obama’s are.
I’m not sure if Romney actually believes that keeping taxes for the wealthy as low as possible and scaling back regulations really does bring prosperity for all. But if he does, it isn’t because he concluded that after a careful examination of the evidence (if that were the case, the last decade would have been the most prosperous in American history). He favors those policies because that’s what his party believes and because they reflect his values. Romney may “know how the economy works” in certain ways. But that knowledge isn’t enough.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, July 17, 2012
“Grave Digger”: Mitt Romney’s Deeper And Deeper Hole
If today is the Romney campaign’s idea of how to get out of the box Romney is in, they’re even less ready for prime time than I thought. This is, well, amazing:
“There may have been a thought at the time that it could be part time, but it was not part time,” [Romney spokesman Ed] Gillespie said. “He took a leave of absence and in fact he ended up not going back at all, and retired retroactively to 1999 as a result,” he added.
He ended up not going back at all? So I presume since he retroactively retired, he also paid back the salary he earned during that period. But apart from that, how does the Romney campaign explain the following claims made under oath by Romney and his lawyer testifying about his Massachusetts residence to qualify for the race for governor:
Romney testified that “there were a number of social trips and business trips that brought [him] back to Massachusetts, board meetings” while he was running the Olympics. He added that he remained on the boards of several companies, including the Lifelike Co., in which Bain Capital held a stake until 2001…
“He succeeded in that three-year period in restoring confidence in the Olympic Games, closing that disastrous deficit and staging one of the most successful Olympic Games ever to occur on US soil,” said Peter L. Ebb from Ropes & Gray, [his lawyer at the 2002 hearing].
“Now while all that was going on, very much in the public eye, what happened to his private and public ties to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts? And the answer is they continued unabated just as they had.”
So either Ed Gillespie and Romney are lying now, or Romney and his lawyer were lying then. Which is it? They were and are obviously trying to have it every which way to suit whatever purpose at the moment. But legally, CEOs are responsible for their companies, whether they are managing them full time, part time or even retroactively retiring while managing them. Period. The buck stops with the CEO, just as much as it stops with a president. As a Bain partner at the time said today:
“Mitt’s names were on the documents as the chief executive and sole owner of the company,” Ed Conard, who served as a partner at Bain Capital from 1993 to 2007, said in an exclusive interview with Up w/ Chris Hayes. Asked again if Romney was chief executive officer of Bain Capital from 1999 to 2002, Conard said, “Legally, on documents, I suppose, yes.”
Despite Romney’s statements that he left in 1999, Conard’s new remarks suggest that, in fact, Romney’s continued ownership of the firm enabled him to negotiate a better exit deal. “We had to negotiate with Mitt because he was an owner of the firm,” Conard said.
Romney, in other words, doesn’t have a leg to stand on. He has been running a campaign against the “Obama economy” insisting that the president own every single month he has been in office in order to condemn his economic management all the more – despite at least a first year in which Obama cannot really be held responsible for the fallout of an economic collapse he inherited. So Romney insists on maximal responsibility for Obama and the economy.
But responsibility for Bain? Think about it. No one disputes that Romney co-founded Bain, hired most of its staff, and honed its methods and strategies from 1984 to 2002. No one can dispute that he was paid at least $100,000 from 1999 to 2002 for being CEO. There is no massive difference between the kind of strategies Bain pursued from 1984 to 1999 when Romney was managing full-time and from 1999 to 2002, when he was managing part-time and by his own lawyer’s assertion that his Bain activities “continued unabated just as they had.” Is Romney saying that nothing that happened at Bain after 1999 is his responsibility but that everything that happened after January 2009 is all Barack Obama’s fault?
Yep, that’s what he’s saying. It’s a pathetic double standard argument from a suddenly pathetic and panicking campaign. The only way he can dig out of this hole – yes, Bill Kristol is right – is to release 12 years of tax returns just as his father did. Until he does, the Obama campaign has every right to double and triple their insistent criticism of Romney’s Bain record. And there will be more and more blood in the water.
By: Andrew Sullivan, The Daily Beast, July 15, 2012
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