Mitt Romney Praised ObamaCare Mandate, Exchanges, Portability In 2010

[nitroz]

Mitt Romney Praised ObamaCare Mandate, Exchanges, Portability In 2010

Mitt Romney yesterday said in an interview with CBS News that the individual mandate was a tax, while the plan he put in place in Massachusetts was a penalty, and not a tax. In a video from April 2010, Mitt Romney praised some similarities between his plan and President Obama's. Romney said he liked the individual mandate, the portability of the insurance, the requirement that insurers cover people with a preexisting condition, and the similar exchanges. Romney said his plan was different because it was state plan and his plan did not raise taxes, and did not cut Medicare. (As a Governor, Romney had no authority to cut Medicare.)

 

[Truthmatters]

cons done believe in history

 

[Avorysuds]

So both Mitt and Obama are liars... like many of us have said all along.

 

[oldernwiser]

Here's some "history" I ran into while checking to see what "incentives" Rmoney's plan offered that the ACA plan didn't:

5 painful health-care lessons from Massachusetts

Essentially, Romneycare offers a $1000 FINE for people who are uninsured. Where does THAT cash go? The public coffers with all the other fines like speeding tickets? His plan also prohibits people from refusing insurance offered by employers.

There's something else in this article that needs to be understood. Insurance premiums rise with the cost of services provided. Both Romneycare and ACA are extremely vulnerable to market volatility. They both suffer the same flaw, namely that as premiums rise it becomes much more profitable for businesses to drop coverage entirely - an act that essentially dumps many people into the state/federal-run program all at once. The cash for THEIR unexpected coverage has to come from somewhere, with the net effect of setting the government up for becoming your #1 insurance provider. This does NOT control the cost of your care, but WILL entail either raising your coverage rates or reducing your actual coverage to cover the burden.

6 years into the MA system, and insurance providers there are already beginning to close shop since they can't keep up with the stream of people who wait until they absolutely need coverage and then drop coverage as soon as the need is done, and their rates - which provides the cash flow to pay for the services of these folks - can't rise much more than 7.7% annually no matter how much money they need to pay claims. To me, this is a formula for insurance company insolvency.

All the while, the cost of medical services increases. ACA did something that MA did not - it subsidizes some of the tuition costs for medical students with the hope that this will increase the number of providers in the market. The reasoning here is that with more providers, competition will help to stabilize the cost of services. Maybe. But, the number of providers needs to expand at a percentage that's dramatically in excess of the expansion of our own population in order to produce enough competition to lower costs at all. And that doesn't take into account the rising costs of the durable goods and overhead that our medical practitioners have to pay and pass on their consumers.

IMO, neither Romneycare nor ACA addresses the real problem we face with health care costs. We're still going to see rising costs for as far out as you care to look.