As we draw nearer and nearer to the 2010 Republican primaries, it is shaping up to be a ‘Romney Vs. Obama‘ match up. There are already 2 unquestionable issues that Romney will be able to hit Obama on, that no other candidate can.
- Health Care
- The bailout of Ford, GM, and Chrysler
Romney called upon Obama to NOT give the ‘big three’ a bailout and urged in an article he penned in The New York Times titled Let Detroit Go Bankrupt, that Detroit needed to restructure and file for a chapter 11 bankruptcy rather than receive a bailout from the American taxpayer. Obama decided to bail out the ‘Big Three’ toward the end of 2008 and has since acknowledged that there is a need to restructure. Now the Government owns 70% if GM! AND…BILLIONS of taxpayer’s dollars have been waisted.
Romney has already put in place a universal health care plan that does not give more power to the government and is not a “government takeover of health care. In fact, after Obamacare got such bad feedback from both Republicans and Conservative leaning Democrats in Congress, Obama decided to take a few ideas from Romney’s Massachusetts health care plan.
Let’s look at Eric Fehrnstrom’s points he made on the health care plan in a recent Boston Herals article title Single-Payer Simplistic:
Liberals attack it because it’s not single-payer, and some conservatives object to the individual mandate, but 69 percent of the public expressed its approval in a recent survey. It passed with support of the business community, hospitals, private insurers, Republicans and Democrats. In the 200-member Legislature, there were two dissenting votes, a bipartisan miracle.
The market-driven Massachusetts approach is simple: Strip away regulations to lower the cost of private policies, require everyone to have coverage just as they must for their autos, and convert the money we already spend on free care into subsidies to help the needy buy insurance.
Is it perfect? No, like any bold experiment, it’s going to require fine-tuning. But already some of its best features are being copied by President Barack Obama, such as a health insurance exchange where individuals and small businesses can shop for affordable plans.
Critics who complain about the cost of the subsidies overlook the progress in reducing state payments for free care, a nearly 40 percent drop from $661 million in 2007 to $410 million in 2008. Having achieved near-total coverage, there’s no reason Gov. Deval Patrick can’t further reduce that number. He can drive costs down even more by making adjustments in benefits and by requiring everyone to contribute something to the cost of their insurance.
#1 by John West on July 21st, 2009
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Why doesn’t governor Romney come out and make public statements regarding the battering he is taking on the Mass. Health Care Bill budget shortfalls before the steam roller effect comes in to play and the media spins it irretrevabley against him ?
#2 by Spencer Iacono on July 16th, 2009
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Adam, thank you for your analysis. The plan is obviously not exactly what Mitt would have it be, but I guess that’s about as good as the Democratic legislature will allow. As Mitt stated before “is it perfect?, of course not and it may need some revisions in the future…time will tell.” We need someone who is willing to actually work on a plan to get everyone insured without doing it the easy costly way -raise taxes and turn it over to the government.
I think with Mitt’s plan we have a start in the right direction.
#3 by Adam Kolasinski on July 16th, 2009
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Here’s my take on the Romney healthcare plan. Most of my opinion is based on data underlying the following analysis:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/documents/healthcare_mass_doc.pdf
Romney’s plan was more expensive than people thought at the time it was drafted. This has to do with the part of the plan that gives subsidies to buy private insurance to people whose incomes are too high to qualify for Medicade, but too low to buy private insurance. The drafters thought that the increased expenditure for this subsidy would be offset by reduced state spending on compensating hospitals for treating uninsured people who failed to pay their ER bills.
It turns out that the number of uninsured people who qualified for the subsidy was higher than anticipated, and while there was a big reduction in the uncompensated ER reimbursement, it wasn’t big enough to cover the cost of the subsidy. So on net, the plan has cost taxpayers some money.
It hasn’t been all that much, though. The new subsidy costs the state $800 million per year, but reimbursements for uncompensated care have gone down by $275 million per year. So on net, the plan has ended up costing the taxpayers $525 million on an anual basis, which is not all that much compared to the total state budget of $28 billion. All my numbers are from the 2009 budget.
On other fronts, premiums for individual policies have gone down, and the reform plan has made it legal for insurers to sell cheaper policies with higher deductible and co-copays that they previously weren’t allowed to sell. As a result, things got much better for people who are self employed or whose employers did not offer insurance.
Premiums for employer-sponsored group plans, however, have gone up at approximately the same rate as they did before the plan was passed.
So in sum:
The plan made people who were to rich to qualify for Medicade, but too poor to buy insurance on their own, much better off as they can now afford insurance.
It also made better off the self-employed and those who worked for employers too small to offer insurance, as premiums for individual policies have gone down.
It didn’t affect the vast majority of people who get insurance through their employer.
It made the taxpayers slightly worse off because the subsidy for the too-rich-for-medicade but too-poor-for-private-care group was higher than expected and was not completely offset by reductions in uncompensated care reimbursements