JimofPennsylvan
Platinum Member
- Jun 6, 2007
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In the Wall Street Journal on October 20, 2011 there was an editorial article "The GOP and Romney Care" which essentially gave the Republican extreme right wing/tea party position on the 2010 healthcare legislation and hammered Mitt Romney for his Massachusetts legislation which was similar to the 2010 legislation. The article called for the Republican party and the other Republican Presidential candidates to really give Romney the business on the healthcare issue and move him to adopt their position.
This article underscored some really huge shortcomings in the extreme right wing position. It condemned Obama and Romney for trying to provide affordable health care to all by giving low and middle income American's subsidies to buy health insurance. This criticism is illegitimate because the fifty to sixty percent of Americans (not on medicare) that get health insurance through an employer are getting a subsidy because the premiums paid by both the employer and employee are exempt from federal taxes. These extreme right wing conservatives claim the answer is to get the price down on insurance and the way to do this is to allow choice in insurance plans for consumer and allow competition among insurers; yes this would help dramatically but if your talking about a decent health plan that will provide you with adequate coverage if you get really sick the price of such insurance will not be affordable to many ordinary working Americans.
The Republicans do not have a winning game plan for the health insurance issue for the 2012 elections; yes Obamacare is a complete disaster the democrats totally underestimated the cost of the insurance with all the mandates attached to the law and they have totally underestimated the number of employers that will stop offering health insurance because it is less expensive to pay the penalty and the government entitlement plan insurance will be so much better than what they can offer their employees. The Republican plan to repeal and replace is likewise a disaster, allowing the purchase of insurance across state lines and scrapping mandates isn't enough. Your replacement law is going to have to have minimal mandates if it is to get majority support it is going to have to ban insurance companies from dropping people when they get sick, it is going to have to have generous yearly limits and lifetime limits for coverage when people get sick with cancer or heart disease it will have to pay for reasonable levels of treatment and the insurance will have to cover children on parents plans until the children reach twenty five years of age because Americans really like that mandate. Republicans your replacement law won't get health insurance to tens of millions of Americans, you have to change your plan to add subsidies to make it affordable for low and middle income working Americans. Good Republicans have endorsed such a plan in the past former Senator Bill Frist in 2009 supported such a subsidy plan accompanied with a high-deductable catastrophic insurance coverage plan. I bet that if back in 2010 when the Democrats were poised to pass Obamacare and there was all the public rallies for and against and quite a few Republican members of Congress were pleading with the Democrats not to pass this bill that would affect like one-eighth of the economy many Republicans in Congress would have supported a Bill Frist type piece of legislation. So you guys accept such a bill now that makes such good sense and the majority of American people can accept as an acceptable solution. I'll tell you right now that if Democrats running for national office are smart they will use this health care issue as a stick and beat their Republican opponents with it and they will be very successful in that effort because the Republicans are not offering a solution on this problem they didn't in 2009 and 2010 and they still aren't.
Mitt Romney is the only Republican presidential candidate offering a position on the healthcare issue that the majority of American will find acceptable which is let the states opt out if they want but if they don't here is a plan that will practally provide affordable health insurance for all. This writer is a registered independent and is not a supporter of Romney or any other Republican candidate and believes if Barack Obama is reelected it will be extremely bad for the country he will unleash the EPA and other regulatory agencies on America's businesses and kill jobs and he will fail to cut the federal non-military budget and entitlement programs and send our country into a deep economic spiral.
What is really alarming about the Republican Party is that at the present moment they are beating on Romney because supposedly his Massachusetts insurance program allowed illegal immigrants to get subsidized health insurance. This is small issue, the immigration problem is a failure of the federal government to do its job attacking Governor Perry about allowing illegal immigrant young men and women to get in state tuition at state colleges is petty as well as is this insurance criticism on Romney. This whole matter is really alarming because Mitt Romney is by far the strongest presidential candidate the Republicans have; Santorum is a right-wing Republican foot soldier Americans will reject because they want someone who is their own person, Bachman is rejectable because she is somewhat a little bit of an air-head, Cain is rejectable because of his federal sales tax idea the American people in no way shape or form going to give Washington another source of revenue they can spend irresponsible, Gingrich has mega-character issues, Ron Paul is in left field and Perry is too inexperienced he fails to see the complexity and nuances in many issues. If the Republicans keep this tearing their candidates apart because their not pure what they are going to end up with is Barack Obama winning reelection not because he has majority support among the American people to be President but because he was the best alternative on the ballot for President!.
This article underscored some really huge shortcomings in the extreme right wing position. It condemned Obama and Romney for trying to provide affordable health care to all by giving low and middle income American's subsidies to buy health insurance. This criticism is illegitimate because the fifty to sixty percent of Americans (not on medicare) that get health insurance through an employer are getting a subsidy because the premiums paid by both the employer and employee are exempt from federal taxes. These extreme right wing conservatives claim the answer is to get the price down on insurance and the way to do this is to allow choice in insurance plans for consumer and allow competition among insurers; yes this would help dramatically but if your talking about a decent health plan that will provide you with adequate coverage if you get really sick the price of such insurance will not be affordable to many ordinary working Americans.
The Republicans do not have a winning game plan for the health insurance issue for the 2012 elections; yes Obamacare is a complete disaster the democrats totally underestimated the cost of the insurance with all the mandates attached to the law and they have totally underestimated the number of employers that will stop offering health insurance because it is less expensive to pay the penalty and the government entitlement plan insurance will be so much better than what they can offer their employees. The Republican plan to repeal and replace is likewise a disaster, allowing the purchase of insurance across state lines and scrapping mandates isn't enough. Your replacement law is going to have to have minimal mandates if it is to get majority support it is going to have to ban insurance companies from dropping people when they get sick, it is going to have to have generous yearly limits and lifetime limits for coverage when people get sick with cancer or heart disease it will have to pay for reasonable levels of treatment and the insurance will have to cover children on parents plans until the children reach twenty five years of age because Americans really like that mandate. Republicans your replacement law won't get health insurance to tens of millions of Americans, you have to change your plan to add subsidies to make it affordable for low and middle income working Americans. Good Republicans have endorsed such a plan in the past former Senator Bill Frist in 2009 supported such a subsidy plan accompanied with a high-deductable catastrophic insurance coverage plan. I bet that if back in 2010 when the Democrats were poised to pass Obamacare and there was all the public rallies for and against and quite a few Republican members of Congress were pleading with the Democrats not to pass this bill that would affect like one-eighth of the economy many Republicans in Congress would have supported a Bill Frist type piece of legislation. So you guys accept such a bill now that makes such good sense and the majority of American people can accept as an acceptable solution. I'll tell you right now that if Democrats running for national office are smart they will use this health care issue as a stick and beat their Republican opponents with it and they will be very successful in that effort because the Republicans are not offering a solution on this problem they didn't in 2009 and 2010 and they still aren't.
Mitt Romney is the only Republican presidential candidate offering a position on the healthcare issue that the majority of American will find acceptable which is let the states opt out if they want but if they don't here is a plan that will practally provide affordable health insurance for all. This writer is a registered independent and is not a supporter of Romney or any other Republican candidate and believes if Barack Obama is reelected it will be extremely bad for the country he will unleash the EPA and other regulatory agencies on America's businesses and kill jobs and he will fail to cut the federal non-military budget and entitlement programs and send our country into a deep economic spiral.
What is really alarming about the Republican Party is that at the present moment they are beating on Romney because supposedly his Massachusetts insurance program allowed illegal immigrants to get subsidized health insurance. This is small issue, the immigration problem is a failure of the federal government to do its job attacking Governor Perry about allowing illegal immigrant young men and women to get in state tuition at state colleges is petty as well as is this insurance criticism on Romney. This whole matter is really alarming because Mitt Romney is by far the strongest presidential candidate the Republicans have; Santorum is a right-wing Republican foot soldier Americans will reject because they want someone who is their own person, Bachman is rejectable because she is somewhat a little bit of an air-head, Cain is rejectable because of his federal sales tax idea the American people in no way shape or form going to give Washington another source of revenue they can spend irresponsible, Gingrich has mega-character issues, Ron Paul is in left field and Perry is too inexperienced he fails to see the complexity and nuances in many issues. If the Republicans keep this tearing their candidates apart because their not pure what they are going to end up with is Barack Obama winning reelection not because he has majority support among the American people to be President but because he was the best alternative on the ballot for President!.