Conservatives for Romneycare: I'm Not Kidding...

In fact, we have already seen the start of this process in Massachusetts, where Mitt Romney’s health care reforms were nearly identical to President Obama’s. Romney’s reforms increased the demand for health care but did nothing to expand the supply of physicians. In fact, by cracking down on insurance premiums, Massachusetts pushed insurers to reduce their payments to providers, making it less worthwhile for doctors to expand their practices. As a result, the average wait to get an appointment with a doctor grew from 33 days to over 55 days. The New York Post

People calling themselves conservatives are coming out in favor of Romneycare. Romneycare is the result of the 1994 Republican alternative to Hillarycare written by the Heritage Foundation, that, which you can see above, became Obamacare. Now there is a group claiming to be "conservative" coming out supporting for this progressive piece of legislation.

David French ignores that Romneycare is Obamacare and the fact Massachusetts healthcare premiums rose to the highest in the nation to give praise to the mandate that forces people to purchase healthcare insurance.

I enjoyed reading Veronique’s and Douglas’s posts analyzing the costliness of Romneycare. Count me as one of those conservatives who actually like what Mitt Romney did when faced with very real political challenges in Massachusetts. The Democratic alternative to Romneycare — a very high and punitive business tax — was far worse than the state individual mandate, and he did exactly what we want governors to do when faced with political challenges from the left: lead their state in a direction that is more conservative than the alternative, and consequently leave their citizens better off than they would have been under Democratic leadership.

How can we measure the success or failure of Romneycare? Veronique and Douglas emphasize cost, but of course cost is but one measure of success. In fact, cost containment wasn’t the primary goal of Massachusetts health-care reform — universal coverage was. And on that score Romneycare unquestionably succeeded. At a minimum, I’d suggest measuring the success of constitutionally appropriate government reform by asking three key questions: First, did it accomplish its stated goals? Second, does the reform maintain the consent of the governed? Third, is the program affordable and sustainable? (I added the constitutional qualifier because unconstitutional reform should be off the table regardless of its popularity or cost-effectiveness).

It’s undisputed that Massachusetts has the lowest percentage of uninsured citizens in the nation. As rare as it is for government programs to actually accomplish their stated goals, I’m not sure why we continue to glide over this fact as if it’s insignificant. Don’t we want more citizens to have health insurance? Doesn’t that actually help close the gap in uncompensated care created when Ronald Reagan signed into law the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act? Reagan’s law effectively ended a free market in health care when it mandated that every federally funded ER (which is virtually every ER in the nation) treat patients without regard for their ability to pay. There’s no such thing as a free market when a vendor has to provide a product without compensation. Romneycare was a logical response to not only the problem of uninsured citizens but also to the problem of uncompensated care.

This is the dishonesty that is coming with Romneycare. They will lie to the American people about what Romneycare really is, but for us true conservatives who know the truth, we know Obama will head this off at the past noting there is little difference between Obamacare and Romneycare.