Why Mitt Romney Should Be Unacceptable For Conservatives
Because he and Hillary Clinton think alike when it comes to health care:
As he campaigns for the White House, Mitt Romney has had to tap dance around the health-care reforms he enacted while governor of Massachusetts. The first bit of bad news was that the plan’s cost was higher than predicted. Then it reneged on its commitment to cover the uninsured. But the latest bit of news about “RomneyCare” may require even fancier footwork.
The Left is now thanking Romney for making HillaryCare respectable again. . . .
...the aspect of RomneyCare that most resembles HillaryCare is its very centerpiece, which Romney borrowed from the conservative Heritage Foundation: the health insurance “Connector.”
Cohn is essentially correct. The objective of the “Connector” bureaucracy, as described by Heritage Foundation scholars, reads like an exercise in government planning. The “Connector” is supposed to “reorganize[e]…a large part of the state’s private insurance system into a ‘single market’ structure with uniform rules and a central ‘clearinghouse’ for administering coverage.”
Why, exactly, do we need a new layer of government bureaucracy to do these things? So we will have someplace to buy health insurance? We’re getting along just fine without layering more bureaucracy on our auto insurance. In fact, we already have a connector for both health and auto insurance. It’s called the Internet. Has anyone ever heard of eHealthInsurance.com?
Why do we need a “Connector” to tell health insurers what to sell and at what price? Those sorts of price controls and mandated benefits are exactly the kind of government planning that is making health insurance so unaffordable. Shouldn’t conservatives be trying to repeal those laws, instead of creating new bureaucracies that will propose, enforce, and defend them?
They should be, but the ones in power aren’t.
Read the whole thing.
