Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney’s narrow win in the Iowa
caucuses and his lead in the New Hampshire primary could catapult
him to the GOP presidential nomination, but if he is to have any
hope of gaining favor with conservative voters to get elected in
November, he must escape the chains of Romneycare.
Romney has been unwilling to repudiate the health reform
he signed into law in 2006, complete with the hugely unpopular
individual mandate. The latest Associated Press-GfK poll shows only
15 percent of the American people think the government should have
the power to require citizens to purchase health insurance or pay a
fine.
That’s what Obamacare will do — barring a Supreme Court
repudiation — and that’s what Romneycare already does.
In a November interview on Fox News, Romney got testy when
anchor Bret Baier asked him, “Do you think a mandate,
mandating people to buy insurance, is the right tool?”
Romney replied, impatiently, “What we did in Massachusetts
was right for Massachusetts. I’ve said that time and time again.…
This is not a federal plan, it’s a state plan.”
Romney is stubbornly defensive about his universal
coverage law, poking a finger in the eye of Republican voters who
rightly see it as the platform for President Obama’s takeover of
health care. John McDonough, who helped design both Romneycare and
then Obamacare, said the federal law is “Massachusetts with three
more zeros.”
Democratic pollster Patrick Caddell is among those
insisting the health law will continue to be a huge issue in the
2012 election. Romney’s defenses just aren’t convincing, and as a
result, voters distrust him on what he would do next in this
crucial area. There is a way out of this box for Romney, but first,
let’s look at some examples of his current strategy and why it
isn’t working:
• Repeal and Replace — with
Romneycare? In the October 11, 2011 debate,
Romney said: “…we all agree about repeal and replace. And I’m proud
of the fact that I’ve put together a plan that says what I’m going
to replace it with.”
He says he wants to repeal and replace Obamacare, but then
he says what he would replace it with is Romneycare! No wonder
voters are worried. Does he really mean that he wants to use
Massachusetts as a model for his “replacement” plan?
• Waivers for the
states. Romney has said repeatedly that one
of his first acts as president would be to “put out an executive
order granting a waiver from Obamacare to all 50
states.”
But Romney can’t use an executive order to wipe out a
massive new federal entitlement program and its huge taxpayer
subsidies for health insurance, a vast expansion of Medicaid
coverage, the Medicare rationing board, $550 billion in new and
higher taxes, $575 billion in cuts to Medicare, and federal
mandates on individuals, businesses, and the states to comply with
the law. These are all part of the federal health overhaul law and
simply cannot be waived by executive order.
The Congressional Research Service sent a letter to Sen.
Coburn in November confirming this. “A President would not appear
to be able to issue an executive order halting statutorily-required
programs or mandatory appropriations… [or blocking] an agency from
promulgating a rule that is statutorily required by PPACA,” the CRS
concluded.
So Romney’s campaign slogan is calling for an action that
simply would not be legal. Waivers are not a solution and, in fact,
might well detract from the ultimate goal of repealing Obamacare
and replacing it with a genuine free market alternative.
• Mimicking Obama. When
Romney says he wants to give states more discretion in implementing
Obamacare, there is very little daylight between his position and
President Obama’s.
The president has said Congress should pass legislation to
accelerate the provision in the law that would allow states more
flexibility in implementing the health law starting in 2017,
arguing Congress should move the date forward to 2014. That is
precisely Romney’s position. Not much room for debate
there.
• Individual mandate
affects everyone. Romney seems especially
proud of the individual mandate requiring all residents to have
health insurance as “the ultimate conservative idea.”
When asked about the despised issue, Romney says: “Our
bill dealt with eight percent of our population, the people who
aren’t insured and said to them, if you can pay, don’t count on the
government, take personal responsibility.”
But the mandate applies to everyone, not just to the eight
percent who were uninsured.
• Romneycare and taxes. He also defends
Romneycare by saying that Massachusetts didn’t raise taxes to
finance his plan. That’s because Massachusetts simply passed a big
share of its costs along to federal taxpayers. Massachusetts relied
on previously enacted health insurance taxes and an infusion of
federal Medicaid money to finance its coverage
expansion.
Washington didn’t have any higher government authority to
draw from so it had to raise taxes to finance Obamacare. The fact
that a significant part of Massachusetts’ coverage expansion relied
on federal Medicaid money defies Romney’s position that the Bay
State’s reform was a state solution.
• Medicare cuts. Romney also boasts,
accurately, “We didn’t cut Medicare.” This is a bogus boast,
however, since states have no authority over spending in the
federal Medicare program, and cutting Medicare therefore never was
an option with Romneycare.
• The speed of repeal.
Romney pledges to pursue the ultimate goal of repealing
Obamacare and replacing it with “free-market reforms that promote
competition and lower health-care costs. But since an outright
repeal would take time, an executive order is the first step in
returning
power to the states,” he wrote
earlier this year.
Actually, it wouldn’t. Romney’s cautious step-by-step
approach overlooks the fact that the Republican
House passed a repeal bill within a
few weeks of taking power. If there were a majority in the Senate
supporting repeal, then a new president could have a repeal bill to
sign on his desk within a month or two of taking office.
Why on earth would a President Mitt Romney want to send
states on a wild chase to start implementing Obamacare in a
different way when, as he himself observes, the ultimate goal must
be total repeal?
ROMNEY’S ATTEMPT TO DISTANCE himself from the despised
health care law isn’t working. He is simply not able to talk his
way around it. A video has surfaced recently of a 2010 appearance
by Romney that is causing new alarms in which he says of Obamacare,
he would “repeal the bad and keep the good.”
There is a way out, however: Romney needs to take a bolder
step and say that the law he passed in Massachusetts never would
work for our diverse and complex country, that he shouldn’t have
tried to do so much all at once, and that he should have put health
costs, not universal coverage, at the top of his priority list. He
needs to emphasize as strongly as he can that a federal mandate to
purchase health insurance is unconstitutional and that he wants to
sign a bill fully repealing Obamacare. And he needs to explain what
really happened in the passage of Romneycare.
The health reform plan he pushed in Massachusetts was
different in key respects from the one that became law — and which
became the model for Obamacare.
Few voters know that Romney wanted an escape from the
individual mandate, by allowing people to instead be able to post a
bond in case they were uninsured and had big medical
bills.
When Romney signed the law, he believed it contained the
bond escape hatch, but legislators took it out at the last
minute.
Romney also objected to the employer mandate and vetoed
the provision that requires employers with 11 or more workers to
provide health coverage or pay an annual fee of $295 per
worker.
He also vetoed several other provisions, and every one of
his vetoes was overridden by the overwhelmingly Democratic
legislature. Should Romney have known this was likely? Yes. Should
he have known exactly what he was signing? Absolutely. But voters
may be more forgiving if he tells them he wanted to give citizens
and employers a way out.
If Gov. Romney is serious about repealing Obamacare, he
will have to devote all of his energies to doing that as soon as
possible.
As primary voters continue their serial search for the
non-Romney candidate, Romneycare remains his Achilles’ heel.
Granting waivers would simply allow Obamacare to sink its
roots even deeper into our economy and health sector and would send
a mixed message to the Congress, to the states, and to the American
people about what he would do.
Unless he takes steps to remedy his position, he will have
trouble convincing Republican voters he is serious about repeal and
will have an even harder time mapping a clear plan on health reform
should he be elected president.
