Say Anything Blog

When Mitt Romney’s health care plan in Mass. (Romneycare, as I like to call it) was first making headlines I said that his backing of this plan, essentially state-specific socialized medicine, put him off my list for potential Presidential candidates in 2008.  As GOP Presidential hopefuls, including Romney, begin to start their engines for the race for the party’s nomination, I think it’s important for conservatives to keep Romney’s plan in mind.

To that end, Liz Mair has an excellent column over at Human Events today highlighting just how potentially awful Romney’s health care plan is not just for the state he used to govern but also for the nation as a whole.

RomneyCare, Gov. Mitt Romney’s “revolutionary” healthcare initiative, was introduced earlier this year to applause from the mainstream media, Senators Hillary Clinton and Teddy Kennedy, and Families USA—all wild at the idea of universal healthcare in Massachusetts. Such endorsements were not the best of signs for conservatives, but they were certainly eye-catching, especially with the hunt for future presidential talent on. And many Republicans were wondering whether RomneyCare was the conservative solution to the problem of uninsured Americans that the party was looking for.

Almost immediately after the bill creating it was signed into law, the Wall Street Journal ran an op-ed, which claimed that, under RomneyCare, “the state is forcing people to buy insurance many will need subsidies to afford, which is a recipe for higher taxes and more government intervention down the road.” Not so, said Romney. Despite the potential weight of RomneyCare on the public purse—likely to be exacerbated by the plan’s focus on signing up the 20% of Massachusetts’ population that is eligible for Medicaid, but not enrolled—Romney said he would not need to raise taxes to pay for the program.

Of course, he was right. RomneyCare has not even been fully implemented yet, and a cost overrun of $151 million in 2007 alone is already in the cards, perhaps because the RomneyCare financial model assumed the wrong number of uninsured in Massachusetts (the Census Bureau puts it at 748,000, but RomneyCare assumes only 500,000). But any needed hike in taxes won’t be pushed through by Romney—he’ll be out of office when the bill comes due, and when extra federal dollars will likely have to be allocated to Massachusetts to help cover the shortfall between RomneyCare’s cost and its budget.

Yes, RomneyCare is reliant on federal funds. So imagine if, as Romney hopes, it is replicated in other states. Even if we do not have federally-mandated universal healthcare a la HillaryCare, we could easily end up with that option’s badly behaved little brother—“state-specific” universal healthcare, funded in large part, and at greater than current levels, by the federal government.

Be sure to read the whole thing.

Right now there don’t appear to be a lot of good choices for principled conservatives among potential nominees in 2008, but I’ll take John McCain and his pandering rule-by-opinion-poll ways or Rudy Giuliani and his pro-choice views over Romney and more massive increases in entitlement spending any day of the week.