Mitt’s Mass Med Mess

So let me get this straight….

The cost of Massachusetts’ health insurance mandate will rise 85 percent, or $400 million, next year. Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who rammed this down all of our throats, won’t have to answer for all this because the Mass healthcare plan doesn’t fully go into effect until after the presidential election.

How convenient. Tell everyone how great the plan, you stuck your old state with after you left office, is.

As it turns out, the same Mitt Romney who claims to be a Reagan conservative has left an already cash-strapped state with the inevitability of increased taxes to cover the additional costs of his national healthcare model.

It’s a shame we didn’t parse his words like we did Bill Clinton. Sure, the plan didn’t require a raise in taxes while he was governor. The plan wasn’t in place yet.

Romney said…

“I’d say each state needs to get busy on the job of getting all our citizens insured. It does not cost more money.”

Nothing from Mitt about tort reform.

One of the reasons healthcare costs are so high is that doctors have to carry outrageous amounts of malpractice insurance to protect themselves from people like John Edwards. That cost, along with the annual amounts of near-unfettered fraud, is always passed down to the consumer.

Also remember, there was a time when many of us didn’t have health insurance. I can only remember going to the hospital or a clinic once or twice during my childhood. We didn’t have helicopter moms taking us into the doctor’s office as soon as our noses started running or our tummies hurt.

As a Massachusetts resident who saw the man in action, I told you Mitt Romney comes off as a phony, thus it’s hard to believe anything the man says while in election mode.

From a speech posted on Mitt’s own website he said…

“Healthcare is not a Democrat issue. It’s a Republican issue; it’s a conservative issue. Democrats look at problems like this and they have one answer: government. ‘We need bigger government, they say, so we can manage problems like this.’ That’s the wrong answer. Conservative principles have the answer for health care.”

He listed them off as “personal responsibility, free market dynamics, choice”, and being able to do all this without a government takeover. Well, aside from throwing his conservative principles under the bus, we sure are as close as we’ll ever get to a government healthcare takeover. How do we know this? Private industries seldom require tax increases.

Maybe it’s just that I never knew what real conservatism was, but I was always under the impression that real conservatives were for government that didn’t impose itself in our lives.

I guess Mitt Romney has proven us wrong.