Mitt Romney on Health Care
Saturday, November 12th, 2011
We’ve been reviewing the Republican presidential candidates’ positions on two popular federal programs, Social Security and Medicare. The results of the 2012 elections could have a big impact on the future of these programs.
But what about health care in general? Health care costs in the United States have been climbing higher and faster than in any other nation. The rise in cost threatens the future of the Medicare program as well as the American economy in general. How would the presidential candidates address this problem?
Republican candidate Mitt Romney should be uniquely qualified to speak to health care reform. Health care reform was one of his most significant achievements when he was governor of Massachusetts. A law he helped pass in 2006 is still popular — a Harvard/Boston Globe poll taken earlier this year found that 63 percent of Massachusetts residents support Gov. Romney’s reform. Thanks to Gov. Romney, today a higher percentage of Massachusetts citizens have health insurance coverage than in any other state.
The problem is that Gov. Romney’s Massachusetts law became the model for the health care reform signed into law by President Obama last year. As other politicians put it, “Romneycare” was the blueprint for “Obamacare.”
If there is anything the Republican Party agrees on these days, it is that President Obama’s health care reform law is really, really awful and must be repealed. And poor Mitt Romney is in the uncomfortable position of having to take credit for his popular Massachusetts program while also saying that its provisions were a terrible mistake that shouldn’t be repeated.
For the most part, the former governor has fallen back on the argument that what works on a state level wouldn’t work on a federal level, although he hasn’t explained precisely why that might be true.
What would a President Romney do to lower health care costs? His campaign website says, “Our next president must repeal Obamacare and replace it with market-based reforms that empower states and individuals and reduce health care costs. States and private markets, not the federal government, hold the key to improving our health care system.”
The idea that “private markets” can fix what’s wrong with our system is conservative orthodoxy these days, but there is no proof of any sort, anywhere, that it is true. The United States has the most privatized health care system of any other nation in the industrialized world, and it has the biggest problems with out-of-control cost.
If “private markets” could solve our problems, you’d think they would have done it already. Instead, state and federal government have patched together a safety net of programs to save some of the people the private markets refuse to serve — including seniors, who rely on Medicare.
But Mitt Romney is going all-in for privatizing these days. As explained in the last post, he is now talking about turning Medicare over to private insurance companies, for example. And yesterday he suggested to a group of veterans that it might be a good idea to phase out Veterans Administration hospitals and just give veterans vouchers to pay for health care. Veterans often have unique medical needs, such as higher rates of mesothelioma caused by wartime exposure to asbestos.
A spokesperson for the Veterans of Foreign Wars quickly shot down that idea: “The VFW doesn’t support privatization of veterans health care.” The VA runs some of the finest hospitals in the world. Whatever happened to, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”?
