Tag Archives: individual mandate

Mittens Goes Full Circle

Mitt isn’t flip-flopping on health care, he’s actually gone in a complete circle, back to where he began when he first considered Romneycare.  His rationale for Romneycare was that uninsured people were able to go to the emergency room and that the rest of us ended up paying for that.  He supported the individual mandate as imposing “personal responsibility”.

But now that he hates the mandate because it is part of  Obamacare, Mitt thinks the solution is to return to the days of the uninsured going to the emergency room for free.  He told  60 Minutes, “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.”

So what seemed like the problem when he was governor of MA now seems like the solution when he’s the GOP nominee.

Jonathan Gruber, the MIT professor who worked on both Romneycare and Obamacare, told Talking Points Memo,* “The guy has come completely full circle.  The whole idea of Romneycare was to avoid this kind of free riding.”

* “Romney Solidifies Major Shift on Health Care,” Sahil Kapur

The Real Etch a Sketch Story Is Mitt’s Lie in Response to It

What’s even worse than Eric Fehrnstrom’s Etch a Sketch comment is Mitt’s lie in response to the storm that erupted.

The question Fehrnstrom, who is a smarmy little creep, answered on CNN was clearly about policy positions — whether Mitt had been forced to move too far to the right on the issues during the primaries.

But Mitt lied to say that Fehrnstrom wasn’t talking about starting over on policy in a general election, but purely on campaign organization. “The nature of the campaign itself, in terms of staff, funding, the states we would go to, will be different than today.”  But Fehnstrom wasn’t asked about and wasn’t talking about campaign structure and scheduling.  He was clearly talking about softening some primary stances so they don’t lose groups like women and Hispanics as dramatically as they would if the general election were today.

Rather than face the controversy squarely, Mitt lied to say it was about something else entirely and try to make it go away.  To me, he just made it worse, and lowered my already low opinion of him

There are many things I hate about Mitt.  But I especially hate the fact that he thinks we’re stupid.  He lies all the time (as when he said over and over that President Obama made the economy worse, and then denied saying it; as when he denied saying that he wanted Romneycare’s individual mandates to be part of a national program) and thinks we’re so dumb that he can get away with it.

Because he knows he’s richer than almost all of us, he somehow thinks that makes him smarter as well.

I hope he learns on November 6 that he’s not as clever as he thinks he is, and that we are much smarter than he gives us credit for.