Mitt Romney on Health Care Reform

PS he’s not a suitable or appropriate representative – he wasn’t in 08 and he CERTAINLY isn’t in 2012!! (why would we nominate the 08 loser to the loser now?????)

All states and localities have a variety of their own and often very different mandates. You can look to each state or local government and see what mandates are in place in each different area. There are many, many, many mandates in all states that citizens must abide. Most mandates are statutory or regulatory provisions that either require you to do something or restrict you from doing something. Most mandates require a state or local government to provide a service without providing the funding to go along with it. Mandate fees ARE in fact passed on to the citizens who pay them in the form of a state or local tax which is how mandates and their fees are collected.

Paying for the uninsured’s health costs is one mandate that is absolutely already being paid for by other citizens in the form of higher taxes that go to reimburse these unpaid for medical costs or by higher insurance premiums. Other mandates fall under a variety of categories such as environmental mandates or health and safety mandates that require or restrict you from doing something and may come with fines or fees if you don’t follow the mandate — trash, recycle, littering, emissions, outdoor seasonal burn times, public park wildlife mandates, water restrictions, water-sewer hookups, non-smoking facilities, children must attend school, immunizations, e-file taxes, 911 county mandates, ambulance mandates, daylight savings time, pet restrictions, licenses, homeowners or auto insurance. Not every mandate will affect every citizen in each state, and each state will have different mandates in place for its citizens, but there are so many, many, many mandates are out there at the state levels that most citizens are in fact affected by one mandate or another. Voters of each state or locale can put mandates on the ballot and vote them out if they don’t want them, but it is constitutional to set a mandate for SOME or for ALL. Again, it IS constitutional under the 10th amendment.

Unlike the federal mandate, the Massachusetts mandate is NOT a one-size-fits-all government run healthcare plan made up of government bureaucrats running it; it’s not socialized medicine; it’s not squeezing out the private insurance companies; it’s not collapsing the medicare system; it’s not rationing or denying care or made up of death panels. On the contrary, it’s a free market system made up of private insurance companies that offers a variety of different insurance plans that people can choose from and that they can keep as their own because they’re not tied to an employer or to a job. This mandate is something the citizens of this particular state wanted (unlike the federal mandate), and it can be put on the ballot and voted out if they change their mind and then don’t want it (unlike the federal mandate). If some choose to opt out and not have any insurance, then they pay a penalty every month of what the cost would be to use the services for free ($120), and that money is put into a reserve account at the state to cover those costs of the uninsured instead of passing those costs onto the taxpayers.

You and other anti-Romney-ites are trying to tie the Romney plan to the federal plan 😦 but they are two very different plans. One is socialized medicine run by the government and its bureaucrats and the other is not. The state plan IS constitutional and the federal plan is NOT. States need to fix their own health care plans at the state level and do what their citizens want. The fact is that most citizens don’t want a socialized healthcare system run by a government, but they do want affordable healthcare insurance when it’s done at the state level through the free market system that enables choices and lower costs. 🙂