Rush Limbaugh Talks About Another Way Obama Copied Romneycare

Obama's Model: Romney Denied Conscience Rights and Persecuted Catholic Institutions First

Frick and Frack

As the liberal Governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney not only provided the forerunner for Obamacare, like Obama, he opposed conscience rights and exemptions for faith-based institutions under Romneycare.

From WorldNetDaily

By Joe Kovacs

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney flipped in 2005 to take a stance similar to the Obama administration on hospital mandates for the morning-after pill for rape victims, according to news reports from seven years ago.

According to a Boston Globe article dated Dec. 9, 2005, Romney reversed course on the state’s emergency-contraception law, saying all hospitals in Massachusetts would be obligated to provide the morning-after pill to rape victims.

Has RomneyCare Put ObamaCare on a Path to Repeal?

Investor's Business Daily has an excellent article by Sally Pipes on what RomneyCare has done to Massachusetts and why that experience underscores the urgency of repealing ObamaCare.

The Heritage Foundation provides the following snapshot of how Mitt Romney's plan is destroying Massachusetts:

Of the 410,000 newly insured in Massachusetts, three in four are either paying nothing or very little for their insurance and spending has exploded. 

• The health overhaul was really Medicaid expansion, and with the rolls up nearly 25 percent since 2006, Massachusetts is struggling to pay the bills.
• Despite the near-universal insurance, the state still spends $414 million on uncompensated care, an expense that was promised would disappear.
• Emergency room use has not dropped as predicted --from 2006 to 2008, emergency room use under Mass Care increased by 9 percent.

In addition, private employer insurance costs, far from dropping, have continued to increase.  A 2010 study published in the Forum for Health Economics and Policy found that health insurance premiums in Massachusetts, prior to its overhaul, increased at a rate 3.7 percent slower than the national average.  Post-overhaul, they are increasing 5.8 percent faster.  The individual mandate, as onerous as it is, is set at a level to encourage gaming the system, says Pipes.

• A family with an income of $55,000 in 2014 will face the choice of paying $4,428 a year for health insurance or a $550 fine.

• Given that insurance will be available on demand, it is rational to pay the fine until a serious illness strikes.

Does Romneycare = Obamacare? Cato Says Yes

From The Examiner
By Mark Tapscott

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney is widely considered to be the leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012, but the biggest obstacle he may have to overcome could well be Romneycare, one of his signature programs while serving as the Bay State's chief executive.

More than a few people within and without the GOP - including most notably President Obama and Democratic congressional leaders like Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi - contend that Romney's much celebrated health care reform of 2006 is quite similar to the Obamacare program that became law in 2010.

Romney strongly disputes that characterization, but the very fact it is becoming an issue is indicative of its seriousness as an obstacle to his winning the GOP presidential nomination.

Now comes the Cato Institute with a searing video critique of Romneycare that focuses on the major ways in which it resembles Obamacare. Watch this video and you will have a sense of the urgency of this issue for the Romney candidacy:

Romney's National Health Preview

We have never understood how some conservatives have been seduced by Mitt Romney. He seems to us like the quintessential, big government, big spending, liberal, Rockefeller Republican. His socialist prescriptions for health care offer a good preview of what Obama is eager to inflict on America. The costs of health care in Massachusetts have increased 42% since health care became "free" in 2006. The Romney imposed debacle is bankrupting the state. But then isn't that the point of Obama's policies -- create out-of-control costs, ruin, devastation, a really good crisis, from which will spring radical Marxist reforms.

Today's Wall Street Journal previews what is being prepared for the nation:

The Massachusetts debacle, coming soon to your neighborhood.

Praise Mitt Romney. Three years ago, the former Massachusetts Governor had the inadvertent good sense to create the "universal" health-care program that the White House and Congress now want to inflict on the entire country. It is proving to be instructive, as Mr. Romney's foresight previews what President Obama, Max Baucus, Ted Kennedy and Pete Stark are cooking up for everyone else.

AP

Mitt Romney

In Massachusetts's latest crisis, Governor Deval Patrick and his Democratic colleagues are starting to move down the path that government health plans always follow when spending collides with reality -- i.e., price controls. As costs continue to rise, the inevitable results are coverage restrictions and waiting periods. It was only a matter of time.

They're trying to manage the huge costs of the subsidized middle-class insurance program that is gradually swallowing the state budget. The program provides low- or no-cost coverage to about 165,000 residents, or three-fifths of the newly insured, and is budgeted at $880 million for 2010, a 7.3% single-year increase that is likely to be optimistic. The state's overall costs on health programs have increased by 42% (!) since 2006.

Like gamblers doubling down on their losses, Democrats have already hiked the fines for people who don't obtain insurance under the "individual mandate," already increased business penalties, taxed insurers and hospitals, raised premiums, and pumped up the state tobacco levy. That's still not enough money.

So earlier this year, Mr. Patrick appointed a state commission to figure out how to control costs and preserve "this grand experiment." One objective is to change the incentives for preventative care and treatments for chronic disease, but everyone says that. It sometimes results in better health but always more spending. So-called "pay for performance" financing models, on the other hand, would do away with fee for service -- but they also tend to reward process, not the better results implied.

What are the alternatives? If health planners won't accept the prices set by the marketplace -- thus putting themselves out of work -- the only other choice is limiting care via politics, much as Canada and most of Europe do today. The Patrick panel is considering one option to "exclude coverage of services of low priority/low value." Another would "limit coverage to services that produce the highest value when considering both clinical effectiveness and cost." (Guess who would determine what is high or low value? Not patients or doctors.) Yet another is "a limitation on the total amount of money available for health care services," i.e., an overall spending cap.

The Institute for America's Future -- which is providing the intellectual horsepower (we use the term loosely) for reforms like those in Massachusetts -- argues that the cost overruns prove the state must cap how much insurers are allowed to charge consumers and regulate their profits. If Mr. Patrick doesn't get there first, that is. He reportedly told insurers and hospitals at a closed meeting this month that if they didn't take steps to hold down the rate of medical inflation, he would.

Even the single-payer cheerleaders at the New York Times have caught on to this rolling catastrophe. In a page-one story this month, the paper reported on the "expedient choice" that Mr. Romney and Democrats made to defer "until another day any serious effort to control the state's runaway health costs. . . . Those who led the 2006 effort said it would not have been feasible to enact universal coverage if the legislation had required heavy cost controls. The very stakeholders who were coaxed into the tent -- doctors, hospitals, insurers and consumer groups -- would probably have been driven into opposition by efforts to reduce their revenues and constrain their medical practices, they said."

Now they tell us. What really whipped along RomneyCare were claims that health care would be less expensive if everyone were covered. But reducing costs while increasing access are irreconcilable issues. Mr. Romney should have known better before signing on to this not-so-grand experiment, especially since the state's "free market" reforms that he boasts about have proven to be irrelevant when not fictional. Only 21,000 people have used the "connector" that was supposed to link individuals to private insurers.

Which brings us to Washington, where Mr. Obama and Congressional Democrats are about to try their own Bay State bait and switch: First create vast new entitlements that can never be repealed, then later take the less popular step of rationing care when it's their last hope to save the federal fisc.

The consequences of that deception will be far worse than those in Massachusetts, however, given that prior to 2006 the state already had a far smaller percentage of its population uninsured than the national average. The real lesson of Massachusetts is that reform proponents won't tell Americans the truth about what "universal" coverage really means: Runaway costs followed by price controls and bureaucratic rationing.