Romney’s health plan leaves out universal care
WASHINGTON – GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney on Friday released his principles for national health care reform, but he left out the linchpin of the plan he enacted as governor of Massachusetts: a requirement that individuals get coverage.
Speaking to doctors in South Florida, Romney said he would encourage each state to seek its own solution to the problem of 45 million uninsured people in America. The federal government would play a supporting role by offering tax breaks for individuals to purchase private insurance, granting governors more flexibility in using federal health care funds, overhauling the malpractice litigation system and making other changes.
“A one-size-fits-all national health care system is bound to fail,” Romney said. “It ignores the sharp difference between states, and it relies on Washington bureaucracy to manage.”
Some have accused Romney of running away from his record in Massachusetts. On Friday, he took credit for the experiment there, a work-in-progress now being administered by a Democratic administration. But he pointedly did not endorse an ” individual mandate” at the federal level.
As governor, Romney had insisted that such a requirement was the only way to guarantee coverage for all. Reform would not work if people had the option of remaining uninsured, he argued at the time. Government would provide help for those who couldn’t afford to pay, he had said.
“He is facing a different constituency now, which is the Republican primary voter,” said former Medicare administrator Mark McClellan, a leading GOP health care expert. “They are very concerned with anything that would be perceived as a major expansion in government health care.”
“It sounds to me like he is talking now about his own convictions, and they do seem to be more conservative,” said Grace-Marie Turner, head of the Galen Institute, which advocates market-based fixes to health care problems. “But you can’t help but look at the record of what he actually produced in Massachusetts.”
Although the Massachusetts plan – enacted in 2006 – is closely identified with Romney on the national political stage, it came about through a painstaking process of consensus building. Romney was a key player but not the plan’s sole author.
“This law was a genuine political amalgam,” said John McDonough, executive director of Health Care for All, a Massachusetts advocacy group that played a central role in the debate and sometimes clashed with Romney. “It is absolutely true that Mitt Romney contributed a lot to this law, and it is also true that there is a lot from other sectors and other sources.”
As governor, Romney embraced the idea of requiring individuals to obtain medical insurance as an alternative to requiring all employers to do so, an option that had contributed to the political defeat of a plan put forward in the 1990s by then-President Clinton and first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, who is now seeking the Democratic presidential nomination.
Romney’s latest plan is basically a compilation of standard Republican ideas. He supports tax-sheltered health-savings accounts for routine medical expenses, coupled with lower-cost catastrophic insurance for major illnesses. And, like President Bush, he would let states use federal funds that now pay for hospital care for the uninsured to help citizens buy private insurance.