 by Paul Waldman |
COMMENTARY
Mitt Romney has never liked talking about health care, at least since Barack Obama took office and adopted a plan nearly identical to the one Romney passed as Massachusetts governor. As far as Republicans are concerned, anything Obama touches becomes irredeemably contaminated, putting Romney in the uncomfortable position of condemning something that closely resembles his own greatest achievement in public office. So these days, when Romney is asked about the subject he squirms uncomfortably, smiles insincerely, and tries to move the conversation to friendlier terrain.
But it's not just health care. On a variety of issues, a man famous for his immersion in the details becomes awfully vague when it comes to the costs—financial and otherwise—of what he proposes.
On NBC's Meet the Press Sunday, Romney said something that made lots of heads turn. "I'm not getting rid of all of healthcare reform," he told David Gregory. "Of course, there are a number of things that I like in healthcare reform that I'm going to put in place. One is to make sure that those with pre-existing conditions can get coverage." In other words, if you elect me you'll get the popular part of health care reform, without the part (the individual mandate) that doesn't poll so well.
Concerned about a conservative backlash, the Romney campaign quickly clarified Romney's statement, then clarified their clarification (Steve Benen has the gory details). What Romney actually favors is a far weaker prohibition on denials for pre-existing conditions than what's in the Affordable Care Act; his version is similar to pre-ACA law and would leave tens of millions of Americans potentially unable to get coverage. As Romney knows quite well, since he tackled this problem in Massachusetts, if you want to forbid insurance companies from denying people coverage, you need to get everyone in the risk pool, and that means an individual mandate. But as a presidential candidate, his first impulse seems to be to tell people that with him, you can have your cake and eat it, too.
Something similar happened when Gregory asked about his tax plan. Romney wants to cut tax rates across the board, which would increase the deficit and mean a windfall for the wealthy. But he promises that the cuts won't actually increase the deficit, and the wealthy won't actually pay any less, because he'll eliminate deductions and loopholes the wealthy take advantage of. To know if his proposal adds up, you'd have to know which deductions and loopholes he'd eliminate, of course. But he won't tell us. Gregory asked him repeatedly to name a loophole or a deduction he'd abolish, and Romney kept repeating that he'd eliminate deductions and loopholes, without saying which. It got almost comical when Gregory asked for specifics and Romney said, "the specifics are these, which is those principles I described are the heart of my policy."
And while Romney was talking to Gregory, Paul Ryan was telling ABC News that they won't reveal the specifics of their tax reform because "the best way to do this is to show the framework, show the outlines of these planks, and then work with Congress to do this."
In fairness, Romney and Ryan aren't wrong when they say that Congress would have to work out the particulars of an overhaul of the tax code, and that process would certainly be lengthy and contentious. But once again, they're telling voters they can have the good stuff—tax cuts, hooray!—but not telling us how we'll pay for it. The trouble with those "deductions and loopholes" Romney promises to eliminate is that the big-ticket ones are pretty popular—which explains why he doesn't want to get particular about them. Is he going to eliminate the employer deduction for health-care expenses? Don't bet on it. How about the mortgage interest deduction, the biggest middle- and upper-class entitlement in the budget, costing around $100 billion a year? Will he give that the axe to pay for the income tax rate cut? Not on your life.
There's a limit to how much detail we should demand from candidates. We don't need to know whom they'll appoint to be Deputy Undersecretary of Veterans Affairs, or exactly how much money their Commerce Department will spend promoting American birdseed in foreign markets. But when they're proposing radical policy change—as Romney is on both taxes and health care—they have an obligation to reveal enough for us to actually judge whether their ideas are good or bad. Mitt Romney is hardly the first candidate to promise voters that his presidency will be all gain with no pain. But for a guy who built his campaign on the idea that he's an effective manager who "understands how the economy works," and who picked a running mate touted on the right for his allegedly detailed policy knowledge, he's leaving an awful lot to the imagination.
Paul Waldman is a Contributing Editor with The American Prospect magazine and the author or co-author of a number of books about media and politics, including The Press Effect: Politicians, Journalists, and the Stories That Shape the Political World. His writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, and many other newspapers and magazines.
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He can't specify them because -- like virtually ALL GOP policies -- they would be wildly unpopular. With good reason.
Mitt Romney can not name specifics because he has total contempt for ordinary average Americans like me. The GOP has become the party of the plutocrats with a corporate special interest agenda. Ordinary and average people like me with a wife, family, a W-2, and a mortgage to pay do not matter to the GOP. The GOP only cares about the richest two or three percent of Americans or large corporate special interests. If the GOP really cared about America they would shut down all overseas tax shelters that people like Mitt Romney invest in. The GOP would set up infrastructure bonds that funded public-private corporations so that the trillions of dollars kept in overseas tax shelter gets reinvested into the country. The GOP could set up tax free interest paying bonds that would help states, cities, and local communities invest in schools, infrastructure, green energy projects, and small business investment programs. If the GOP actually cared about average ordinary Americans like me, they would have promptly passed President Obama's infrastructure bills and the American Jobs Act.
The GOP also should have passed the Farm Bill in August. Senator Harkin was on C-Span berating the House GOP for not passing the Farm bill passed by the Senate that had the support of all Farm lobby groups, consumer groups, and Agribusiness groups. Senator Harkin is right the GOP does not give a damn about ordinary, average Americans like me or you. Vote Obama/Biden because ordinary average Americans with families are more important than corporate special interest groups and the plutocrats who fund them.
The Romney – Ryan team, when reminded they were going to discuss the release of details of their Platform, had this to say...
"I SAID THAT I DIDN'T SAY THAT I SAID THAT WHAT I SAID WAS WHAT I SAID BEFORE I SAID I DIDN'T SAY WHAT YOU SAID I SAID I DIDN'T SAY... Right, Ryan?"
"Right, Romney... YOU SAID THAT YOU DIDN'T SAY THAT YOU SAID THAT WHAT YOU SAID WAS WHAT YOU SAID BEFORE YOU SAID YOU DIDN'T SAY WHAT YOU SAID YOU SAID YOU DIDN'T SAY..."
"RIGHT... THAT'S WHAT I SAID..." Next question?
As Joe Scarborough states Romney "is a flawed candidate." In addition, many others have echoed the same beliefs. If the Republicans do not like their candidate you cannot expect rest of the American people to like him. Romney/Ryan has no principles and they are too extreme radical for mainstream America.
If the Republican Party cannot win in this environment, it has to get out of politics and find another business,” declared George Will on ABC’s “This Week With George Stephanopoulos” Sunday.
Conservative radio talk show host Laura Ingraham on Monday called 2012 a “gimme election” for Republicans. But she lamented a lack of strong branding in the Romney campaign’s message.
“And if you’re Mitt Romney, with all of your expertise and all of your knowledge about how the economy works, and you’re in this, you have one shot, man. This is going to be the first line of your obituary: You won or you lost. It’s all on the line for the country, and it’s all on the line for you,” Ingraham said.
Speak Up, Mitt!” is the title of a piece by William Kristol in a forthcoming issue of the Weekly Standard.
The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page wrote Monday that ”The GOP candidate might try explaining his policies. Just a thought.”
The only reason a mandate is required to bring more healthy, non-medical service users into the one sized all bells and whistles Washington, DC designed health insurance policies they are going to be pushing on the states internal exchanges, and the employers is to keep what will already be very high premium increases over the policies that people and employer enjoy now somewhat manageable in costs. The early provisions of ObamaCare that included the first stages of not allowing preemium increases for individual pre-existing condidtions for the insured, and the ability to keep adult children on a parents health insurance until age 26 (therefore defeating the idea of having a healthy insured population in the pool as they will not have their own individual health insurance policies). Hence, in year one, we saw the average family and individual health insurance policies premiums jump 9% in cost, and add an additional 4% this year, far, far above the cost of living increases and the increases in basic medical service costs. And that when the Insurance companies are under the direction and supervision of the Department of Health and Human Services to allocate more of premium payments to pay for medical service delivery, and less for salaries, bonuses, administrative improvements (like upgraded IT systems), and advertising.This has amounted since 2010 passage if the (Un)affordable Care Act to a $2,000 avg. increase in family premiums, to $15,000+a year now, instead of the $2,500 decrease that Obama had promised us. Thats a discrepancy of a swing of $4,500 a year in the wrong direction.
There is much that has to be rewritten in the ObamaCare legislation. After the Supreme Court ruled several provisions unconstitutional, such as the inability to force the separate states from establishing in state health insurance exchanges that have their policies conforming to the one size fits all bells and whistles Wasington DC mandated areas of coverage, or the ability of the federal govenment to coerce the separate states to expand Medicaid. Then there are the suits coming forward yet to the Supreme Court, such as those the church's have brought forward to halt the the mandating of the provision of free oral contraceptive coverage, surgical sterilization procedures, and abortions, and on those issues, the coming suits when the federal government attempts to appropriate the funds after 2014 to provide tax payer financed subsidies to individuals for their premium payments for policies that include those services.
Of course, we already have the spectacle of employers and the unions having been lined up outside the Health and Human Services Chairwoman's office with their appeal for waivers on those one size fits all insurance policies, and resulting granting of same. The only reason they have done this is to control the cost, which will climb sky high when the full weight of the federal mandates come down on this sector of the economy in 2014. There is much that needs to be rewritten here, and it will need to be done in open, with all the stakeholders participating, now special backroom deals as per the likes of what were prominant when this terrible piece of legislation was engineered by the Democrat Party in 2009/2010. This will not be by fiat of a President. It wasn't in Massachusetts, and won't be under a President Romney either.
These and many other discussions and observations, by some very savvy politics-watchers, signals the ultimate demise of the Republican Party as it shakes, rattles and rolls to more and more splintering and contradictions by candidates and conservative pundits alike. The subtle and not-so-subtle racial remarks and ads (Limbaugh's latest is quite disgusting) mark a distinct turning point from similar tactics in the past. Radical right-wingers, Tea Party spokespeople and assorted others putting in their 2 cents all add up to a harking back to the Know-Nothing Party, white supremacists in the 1950s and scare tacticians during the Cold War. The Big Liars are now Romney and Ryan who cannot even make their fabrications consistent. Truth meters and other similar gimmicks pale in the onslaught of pervasive mischief and facial smirks, reminiscent of George Bush. Throwing in the Christian curveball, that they know what's best for all of us, once again reminds us of the whites only club called Jim Crow.
I'm going to put you down as leaning to Obama, jonjonhenry.