I don’t understand politics. All of a sudden RomneyCare vs. ObamaCare is back in the presidential debate and Medicare is on the back burner (somebody tell VP Biden). Kyle Cheney of Politico and formerly of Massachusetts’ Statehouse News Service is out September 30 with an article on all the problems with RomneyCare. His former job makes him uniquely qualified to understand RomneyCare’s “warts,” as he calls them. But his understatement and lack of follow through is breathtaking (I blame this on his new left-wing bosses).
Cheney says RomneyCare’s
“… failure to rein in health care costs is widely acknowledged by nonpartisan analysts,”
Well yeah! Do you really need policy analysts to tell you that when then there is also the draconian Soviet-style price controls just passed by the Massachusetts legislature as a pretty important proof point?
Later in the article as an afterthought, Cheney calls the new Massachusetts price controls “another round of reform.”
Cheney says:
“Whether (RomneyCare) is a success is an open question.”
Really? Why is there a question at all of RomneyCare’s failure when the legislature has had to pass major amendments to it four times in six years? In other words, many rounds of reform so far and still counting.
Cheney says:
“The state’s spending on care for the uninsured has fallen, too.”
But what Cheney ignores is that that spending on the underinsured from the free care pool was supposed to go to almost zero.
What Cheney dismisses as a “too” was Romney’s big idea: the source of the money to pay for his free insurance for poor people was going to be the money being spent from the free care pool to give free healthcare to rich free loaders who weren’t buying insurance. What a misreading of statistics by such a so-called smart guy (Romney, not Cheney).
Cheney also includes the statistically challenged Deval-Patrick lies about decreased morbidity, little budget impact, and a big increase in the uninsured (the increase was statistically insignificant and accomplished by giving away free insurance that – as Cheney documents elsewhere in the article – the recipients didn’t use anyways)
But the real question is why Cheney and the rest of the left-wing press are covering RomneyCare now but didn’t during the Republican primaries.
Yeah, right, That’s another open question.
-- Dennis Byron
