That’s the gist of his recent status update, which is short enough to quote in its entirety:
In the years since the Massachusetts health care law went into effect nothing has changed my view that a plan crafted to fit the unique circumstances of a single state should not be grafted onto the entire country. Beyond that, had President Obama actually learned the lessons of Massachusetts health care, millions of Americans would not lose the insurance they were promised they could keep, millions more would not see their premiums skyrocket, and the installation of the program would not have been a frustrating embarrassment. Health reform is best crafted by states with bipartisan support and input from its employers, as we did, without raising taxes, and by carefully phasing it in to avoid the type of disruptions we are seeing nationally.
Oh, what could have been…
Mitt Romney also sez: http://mashable.com/2013/10/25/overly-suave-it-guy-meme/?utm_cid=mash-com-fb-main-photo
Some non-negligible portion of minimed plans held by the 5% of Americans with individual market coverage were obviously going to be affected by the ACA’s provision minimums. Obama was stupid for saying all and not *almost all* people would be able to keep their health insurance (with, of course, the added bonus of tens of millions more gaining coverage).
This will be a bad few weeks/months for the administration, but I continue to think Republicans are repeating the same mistake they’ve been making since 2008. Obamacare is such strong catnip that they can’t stop obsessing over it long enough to come up with semi-coherent alternatives, medium-run reaction strategies, or long run plans to change the aspects of the law they really can’t live with.
So now we’re in a space where Republicans are decrying the poor customer service experience of shoppers attempting to buy a product Republicans don’t want them to have and vow to take away upon regaining power. And Republicans are decrying a few million people having to re-purchase (perhaps more expensive) plans, yet have offered no post-repeal alternative that doesn’t boot 20, 30, 40 million+ people off their insurance or out of the market entirely.
What happens when the website is fixed? What happens when enrollment accelerates? The irony is that this is exactly what happened in Massachusetts, but it seems Mr. Romney (and his party) also missed those lessons….
Correct link: http://www.buzzfeed.com/andrewkaczynski/mitt-romney-trolls-obama-citing-romneycare-still-says-he-nev
But enjoy Overly Suave IT Guy!
thegalen sounds a lot like the conservatives I knew back in the early 2000s that said “what happens when the WMDs are finally found in Iraq?”
Beside being (rather tasteless) partisan wishful thinking, comparisons between the Iraq war and the ACA belie a basic misunderstanding of two very different political and policy path dependencies.
If it was conservatives’ goal to needlessly kill hundreds of thousands of people, erase a surplus, and leave the next president with reduced fiscal, military, and foreign policy operating headroom, then mission accomplished.
In repealing and replacing the ACA with, say, the Ryan plan adopted and passed by House Republicans, roughly 30-40 million Americans lose their health insurance in one fell swoop (pg. 2: http://kaiserfamilyfoundation.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/8185-02.pdf). Tens of millions more would lose group coverage.
Republicans don’t seem to grasp this, but they’re abetting liberals in painting the right into a box on universal coverage and shrinking the policy space such that disenrichment of benefits is made ever more politically toxic. Put another way, you can’t really run against the ACA on the grounds that people have a right to see their coverage and benefits go unmolested…when your plan is to take away people’s coverage and reduce their benefits.
The analogy was not to the Iraq war, just the wishful thinking that always infests die hard partisans such as you. Your reaction shows that someone is being partisan here, and it’s not me.