Campfire Blog
The creator of government-mandated healthcare in Massachusetts gets a little testy
At last night’s CNN debate, Mitt Romney tried to chastise Rick Santorum for passionately criticizing both Obamacare and Romneycare. Romney said, ‘It’s not worth getting angry about.”
Santorum—and those who think Obamacare is not only a huge fiscal disaster but also an affront to our freedom—disagree. Jeffrey H. Anderson, summarizing the exchange in the Weekly Standard, writes:
“More than anyone else during any of the previous Republican presidential debates, Rick Santorum took dead aim tonight at the similarities between Romneycare and Obamacare.
Arguing that those similarities could pose great problems for the Republican party and for the prospects for repeal if Mitt Romney were to win the nomination, Santorum implored GOP voters to remember, ‘We can’t give this issue away in this election.’”
Read Anderson’s analysis here (about 2.5 pages/1,200 words).
You can also watch the exchange at the CNN debate here, courtesy of the Blaze(4:34).
The benefit of these exchanges is to draw attention to the need to repeal Obamacare. No matter which candidate wins I hope all of them express this goal. I think I’m like most people who have experienced the encroachment of government in our private lives. It’s not good. It is expensive and arbitrary. We’re smarting from disasters like Solyndra but also from the utter mismanagement of the Post Office and lots in-between. What I don’t like about Obamacare is seen best in a diagram that is available online. Just Google it. Many new agencies are created to oversee the administration of this vast government program. Tens of thousands of faceless bureaucrats who do not report to elected officials will have authority to force you to comply with provisions yet unread by our elected representatives. This isn’t a benign healthcare system but a costly autocracy that is a giant step into centralized government control of our lives. There are many ways to create broader healthcare coverage without this enormous, unaffordable expansion of government.
Yes – so much better to have your healthcare decisions made by faceless bureaucrats at insurance companies whose salaries are based on how well they succeed in denying your claim.
Very true that Romney’s health care reforms in Massachusetts form the basis for President Obama’s nationwide reforms. The Romney reforms have made Massachusetts the state with the lowest percentage of uninsured residents in the nation. The Obama reforms will, according to the CBO estimate, bring 45 million Americans under the health insurance umbrella.