One of the favorite deceptions about Mitt Romney's so-called health care reform -- as told by the Journolister mainstream media -- quoting current Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, a cohort of academics and academic wannabees, and even Romney himself is that RomneyCare was only concerned with decreasing the number of uninsured people in Massachusetts.
- It was never about cost containment, they say (particularly Deval Patrick).
- That was always to come later, they say (particularly apologists such as RomneyCare "architect," Jonathan Gruber).
As this continuing series of looking at RomneyCare by PowerPoint (the Mittster's favorite medium) shows, that's not just propaganda. It is just a total lie. There are extensive contemporaneous articles that show that RomneyCare was also about about cost containment. The Journolisters are just too biased or lazy to report the facts.
The following Powerpoint says it all. Cost containment was a co-equal partner in Romney's view. This is the title slide of the presentation Romney used to explain his so-called reform to the Medicaid Commission (the Simpson-Bowles of its day) in January 2006.
At the time, the state of Massachusetts was in need of an extension to a then 9-year-old '1115 waiver' from the Center for Medicare/Medicaid Services to make the RomneyCare budget work (it never did, as we now know). The subtitle itself makes my point that cost containment was a key part of Romney's plan.
But it's worse than that. A reading of the whole presentation indicates a better subtitle would have been:
"Getting a 1115 Waiver to cut Massachusetts state budget costs on uncompensated care, and to control premium and provider costs in the Bay State."
The presentation is clear that even insuring the uninsured was simply a means to the end of cost containment.
Massachusetts got the extra billions in federal money and we keep on getting it. The Boston Globe estimated on June 26 that the federal government paid 80% of RomneyCare's $9 billion and rising price tag in the form of grants, using Medicaid funds to pay for non-Medicaid-eligible residents (not just citizens), and stimulus money. Thanks America.
So..
- How come the state can't afford the number of state cops we need, faces cuts to school aid, has closed state parks, and so forth?
- How come sales taxes went up 20% under RomneyCare along with a dozen other more obscure fees and taxes?
- How come health care insurance premiums have increased 50% or more since RomneyCare?
- And how come provider costs are going through the roof?
Deval Patrick and Jonathan Gruber say it's because cost containment was not a goal of RomneyCare. But isn't it really because market manipulation by bureaucrats does not work?
(Earlier RomneyCare by PowerPoint posts are here and here.)
-- Dennis Byron
