And it isn't, of course. As even NPR noted this morning, both Romney and Gingrich used to support it. It was only after the appallingly cynical right wing effort to demonize the mandate that it became a political minefield. That is easy to do when you blatantly lie to the American people. As Romney is doing on a regular basis, as this example suggests:
Or, as Romney put it in an interview on MSNBC just last week, "personal responsibility is more conservative, in my view, than something being given out for free by government."It is one thing when my idiot ex-girlfriend believes that healthcare reform means handing it out for free. She knows very little and obviously doesn't try to correct that. But when someone like Romney uses those words, he is a lying toad. Openly and blatantly lying.
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Especially guys like Romney should recognize their own lie. He supported this in the past for chrissakes.
And this shit about how somehow health care usurps personal responsibility is the height of stupidity. So, a family faced with a choice between health care and food chooses food. Then they get sick. According to Romney, that's their fault for 1) being poor; and 2) making the wrong decision.
I know that's an extreme example, but his comment smacks of the age-old Cadillac Welfare Mom perpetuated by the Reagan administration but not actually proved by real data. Nobody can find people on welfare choosing Caddys over food...or health care. So these guys create an ideological stance, and create public policy around that stance, based on a notion that doesn't actually exist.
Nearly 59% of the non-elderly general public has employer-sponsored health care. HOWEVER, this is a 10% decline from what it was about a decade ago.
So, Romney's musing is confronted with a problem: if health care is weighted towards "personal responsibility," is it 41% of the public's fault that they choose to keep working at a job that dumped its health care, or is it their fault their employer dumped health care in the first place? And it is their fault that they haven't sprung for their own health care?
Romney is just trying to gain the support of the Republican base, which is mostly anti-Obamacare. If I had to guess, I would say that if gets the nomination, he moves back towards the center.
I think that people will increasingly support some kind of universal care as their employer provided health care gets shittier and shittier. The health insurance I got with my first "real job" back in the early 90's was better that what I get now as part of my wife's relatively excellent, union negotiated health care.
I think people are horribly ignorant as to what happens in the real world of US health care. What do they think a person without health insurance should do? I am sure most of them would rather have a job that provided health insurance, but many entry level, unskilled jobs do not.
Instead, we have a system whereby people without insurance just don't go to the doctor because they can't afford it. Doctors, like most professionals, won't see people unless they can pay. If these people get sick, they just wait until it is bad enough, then they go to a hospital where we all pay for their very expensive care because the hospital is reimbursed by taxes and increased costs for everyone else. It would have been cheaper to pay for medical care early on before they got really sick.
No argument that Romney is trying to appeal to the base. But that kind of pandering is really dangerous. In fact, I have no real idea what Romney actually stands for on any of these issues.
But I wish at least one of the Repubs would step up and note that we aren't giving anything away for free.
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