Romney Changes Course on Health Care
After presiding over an effort to reform health care in Massachusetts, former Gov. Mitt Romney has blinked in the face of the coming national debate on health care reform. In a recent speech, he rejected the key feature of the commonwealth’s bipartisan reform: a requirement that every resident have health insurance.
Romney now says that such a mandate represents a “one-size-fits-all” solution. As president, he would give each state a block grant, giving each the discretion to choose not to cover every resident. States are indeed capable of administering effective health care programs, but throwing money at them without demanding each devise a strategy to expand coverage will by no means guarantee success.
Integral to enactment of the Massachusetts plan was the threat that failure to devise a plan for expanding coverage could cost the state nearly $400 million in federal Medicaid funds. Without that federal pressure, health care providers and insurers might well not have come to the negotiating table.
Mutual responsibility is the cornerstone of America’s social contract, and is the key to any successful effort to reform the health care system. The DLC and PPI have long advocated an individual mandate for health insurance, and in the next administration, it will be an essential requirement to achieve our goal of health care for all.
Despite Romney’s newfound concern that federal requirements would hamstring states, the facts don’t bear him out. Under the type of regime in question, each state would retain primary responsibility for regulating the health insurance market. And states would retain control over the government programs aimed at covering the uninsured.
Many conservatives fiercely oppose a requirement that everyone have health insurance. They see it as affront to individual freedom. But even Milton Friedman understood that it is sometimes necessary to enforce personal responsibility. The economic rational for a requirement that everyone have coverage is based on the fact that as a society, we give health care away for free in the emergency room so people don’t die in the street.
The federal government has a crucial role to plan to expanding health care coverage and lowering costs. The next president will have to embrace the sprit of shared responsibility if we’re going to make the improvements to the American health care system the public is demanding.
September 7th, 2007 at 12:28 am
The Romney-type system that forces people to buy insurance on their own, in the manner of auto insurance, ensures that working class people will not only be forced, as we are now, to choose between food and health care, but will criminalize those who choose food. Bad, bad, bad idea. Think Anatole France, - “The rich as well as the poor are forbidden…to go without health care insurance.”
Keep it as simple as possible. Coverage for all. The savings employers will accrue from no longer having to provide coverage could be at least partially redirected back to health care by eliminating subsidies for employer-provided health insurance and possibly an increase in corporate taxation. If folks wish to supplement, God bless. But coverage for all is prime, no exceptions.