Romney's Mandate Excuses Are "Utterly Unpersuasive" And "Downright Fivolous"
Conservatives Realize The Fact Romney Takes ObamaCare Off The Table Against Obama - Because Romney Agrees With Obama
PoliticalNews.me - Mar 04,2012 - Romney's Mandate Excuses Are "Utterly Unpersuasive" And "Downright Fivolous" - Andrew Mccarthy, National Review
Conservatives Realize The Fact Romney Takes ObamaCare Off The Table Against Obama - Because Romney Agrees With Obama
Romney Urged Obama to Adopt the Individual Healthcare Mandate
By Andrew C. McCarthy, National Review
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/292520/romney-urged-obama-adopt-individual-healthcare-mandate-andrew-c-mccarthy
At BuzzFeed, Andrew Kaczynski breaks the news that, in a 2009 op-ed for USAToday, Mitt Romney encouraged President Obama that he'd be well-served by adopting elements of the Massachusetts Romneycare plan, particularly the individual mandate. [Hat tip, Erick Erickson at Red State.]
In the context of urging on the president "the lessons we learned in Massachusetts" that "could help Washington find" a better way to reform healthcare, Gov. Romney explained, "[W]e established incentives for those who were uninsured to buy insurance. Using tax penalties, as we did, or tax credits, as others have proposed, encourages 'free riders' to take responsibility for themselves, rather than pass their medical costs on others."
This seems very significant. A number of us have expressed concerns that Romney cannot effectively confront Obama on Obamacare, the wrongheadedness and unpopularity of which make it the Republicans' most crucial issue in the campaign. In response, Romney posits that he is a Tenth Amendment guy who saw what he was doing as right for his state, and perhaps other states, but certainly not a national model to be adopted at the federal level. For what it's worth, I've contended that those claims are utterly unpersuasive (some are downright frivolous). But that hardly matters now. The op-ed demonstrates that Mitt regarded Romneycare precisely as a model the federal government ought to adopt, and that the "tax penalties" by which Massachusetts's individual mandate are enforced were a good fit for Congress and the Obama administration to impose by federal law...
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