The problem with this policy is that it favors those that have actually caused the damage. A student that drunkenly breaks a window and has cuts the next day to remind him will be more aware of the "dorm damages" that must be paid than a hard working student that seldom partakes in nightlife and happens to be on the wrong floor. The drunk kid pays the $300 and life goes on, the studious senior learns he had $6 to be paid, his room number has been voided and that he will be drawing with the sophomores.
Governor Mitt Romney came to speak on Tax Day last week. The topic that was the subject of two questions from the audience, myself included, was health care. Here is how the Governor answered those two questions:
Q: Hi, Thank you for coming up here. I applaud you personally for passing the universal healthcare bill in Massachusetts, but then you mention earlier in your speech that it's up to the free market for the healthcare industry being such a large part of the economy. How do you contrast the two, what you've done previously, and your current view on universal healthcare?
A: The president is doing a great job convincing people that his healthcare bill is about getting people insurance and getting everybody covered. That's not what his bill is about. It does that, but it does a heck-of-a-lot more. Getting everybody covered with insurance is frankly, in my view, a good thing. Let me tell you why that is. What we have right now in this country is universal healthcare. You already have it. You're already paying for it. Even before the president's bill. Right now, if someone in this country doesn't have insurance, and they have a heart attack, do you think the don't get treated? No, they go to the hospital, they go to the emergency room in an EMS vehicle, they get surgery, they get a stent or whatever, they get treated, and you're paying for it. We have universal healthcare. Right now, people who can afford to buy insurance make the decision I'm not going to buy insurance, I'm going to be a free-rider, and if I get sick or get in a serious accident, the government is going to pay for me. That, in my view, is the big government solution we have right now. The alternative, there are a couple alternatives, one is to say that employers, you must give insurance to every one of your employees. I said no, I don't want to do that. Thats going to kill jobs. And the other alternative is to say to people, if you can afford to get insurance, you ought to buy insurance, and if you don't buy it, you're going to be penalized with a higher tax rate for not having gotten insurance. Now you tell me which of those is the big government plan and which one of those is the personal responsibility plan. In my opinion, saying to people who can afford to buy insurance, "Buy it," is the personal responsibility plan. And giving people who can afford insurance but instead get free care is the big government plan. We've solved our problem, in the way I described it, in Massachusetts with a bill thats about 70 pages long and we have all of our citizens insured. To make markets work people have to pay for stuff, by the way. If they get something for free, markets can't work. So the first step in making something market-able is by having people have to pay for what they're getting. Otherwise they are getting it for free and the markets don't operate. But then the next step--and by the way the president's plan does that and a heck-of-a-lot more. It ultimately gives the president the power to put the insurance companies, private companies, out of business. And he does that by giving himself price controls, he can tell the insurance companies how much they can charge for their policies, and he also can tell them what has to be included in their policy. By virtue of that he can put them out of business or make them rich as his people decide, and that ultimately in my view is a course which is designed to create a single payer system in this country where the government runs healthcare. They didn't write 2700 pages to do what we did in 70 pages. So thats what I have as a problem with this plan. How do you get healthcare to work more like a market? How do we get healthcare to work like a market? What would have been the alternative? And by the way, I don't know the answer to this because it's never been tested, alright, and I like states rather than the federal government to have the right to solve their problems in their own ways, which is what we did in Massachusetts. The big difference by the way in my plan and the Obama plan is that mine is a state plan, and under the Constitution the states reserve powers not specifically granted to the federal government. So number one it's a state plan, and number two we don't pay for it with new taxes. We did not raise taxes in my state like he does, a half a trillion dollars. Now, how do you make healthcare more like a market? Well right now, you've got a problem in that the people who are making the decision to buy a healthcare product, meaning to have a surgery somewhere, let's say you've got a heart condition, you've got angina, and they tell you, you need triple bypass surgery and you think about going to get it done. Can you imagine asking the hospital what the price is? Has anyone ever asked in this country, the hospital what the price is of the surgery? Of course not. Because once you've paid your deductible, $500, $1000, it's free. So if the hospital bill is $100,000 or $200,000 you couldn't care less because the insurance company is paying it. It's free. How do you get a market to work if people don't care how much something costs? And so in my view we have to take some lessons, believe it or not, from the Swiss and other who have dealt with this, and France even. In France, you pay 20% of your hospital bill--20%. Not the first $1000, you pay 20% of the total bill. So now you care if a hospital is going to charge $100,000 or $200,000. And that simple change creating incentives for patients as well as for doctors to care how much things cost allows the market to begin to work, and I'd like to see that tried in some states before we give that a broader application. But we've got to get healthcare to work like markets. Like a consumer driven market, to get the kind of benefit the consumer driven markets provide everywhere they've been applied. Thank you.
And now here's my question:
Q: Thank you for your service to my home state. I voted for you in 2008 and I'll vote for you in 2012, and I campaigned for you in 2002. But I think you did us a disservice in healthcare. Now I agree with you about federalism and personal responsibility and I know your plan is not like Obama's and I trust you to run it much better than Obama can run anything because I don't think he has run anything before being president. But, the effects of the bill are very clear, I mean, many groups have written about this. Premiums have grown 21-46% faster than the national average, our state already had the highest premiums in the country and part of that is because of the mandates imposed by the Democratic legislature. Now there are a lot of Democrats in the legislature of the country, hopefully that will change, but what will you do to combat the problems of mandates for things like Viagra and alcohol treatment and all the other types of mandates we get that would drive up the cost of healthcare?
A: There is one option as a party, which is when we see a real problem in something like healthcare, to say we're not going to touch it. We're just going to leave it alone. In part, we had the White House, the House and the Senate, they knew healthcare was a huge issue. What did we do? We could have taken action. We could have gotten America on track to solve some of these problems, but instead we let the Democrats do it. And now what they've created is devastating in my view for our economy long term. And so as governor of Massachusetts I took action that I believed was going to help our people and I think it has helped our citizens. But one thing I said was that our policy should not have mandates. They had mandates before our healthcare reform and they continued to have mandates. What do I mean by mandates? The state of Massachusetts and in many other states has the right to tell insurance companies what must be included in their policies. So for instance, do you have to provide unlimited viagra, do you have to provide unlimited in-vitro fertilization treatments, unlimited chiropractic care, mental health care, and so forth, and so my state has put all sorts of mandated coverages in our policies, and as a result they are the most expensive in America. And as a result, they grow faster into cost than those of the rest of the country. That's why in my bill I put forward, I said no mandates. End them, don't do it. Now, my legislature was slightly Democratic. Of my 160 state reps, 19 are Republican. Of my 40 state senators, 5 are Republican. So, they would not accept my proposal of getting rid of those mandates and in my view thats the cause of them continuing to see such high costs in insurance and it's something I've written about and my former secretary of HHS has written about and it's just the reality of us having to make our argument well enough for people to understand it, but there are, I can assure you, there are plenty of things I'd do differently in Massachusetts that are being done now. But, I wasn't elected czar, I tried for that title but they wouldn't give it to me (laughter from audience), and you do the best you can to make sure the you help as many people as you can and you try to make it as good as you possibly can. But is it perfect? It's far from that.
I'm not convinced that simple opposition is enough. We see how difficult it has been getting Republicans behind a moratorium against earmarks. What makes us think it'll be any easier over health insurance mandates?
At long last, I have my thoughts on Mitt Romney’s visit to the Athenaeum. Apparently, my dear readers expect them quickly and for my tardiness, I apologize. Contrary to most people’s assessment, I am a student on campus and I do have other responsibilities, such as graduating with a decent GPA.
In any event, on to Romney! I’m not a proponent of hero worship, but as you know, I’m a fan of Governor Romney – and last night he did not disappoint. He looked presidential, he talked presidential, and his speech, based on his best-selling book, No Apology: The Case for American Greatness, seemed the product of careful thought on matters domestic and foreign. Romney says he wrote the book himself, which seems possible. I envision him saying, “Okay, so I’ve graduated from Harvard Law and Business School, I’ve run Bain, and Massachusetts. Why not author a best-selling book?”
Of course, his well-rehearsed attacks on Obama were great, especially in foreign policy, where his “British media said that the president was more critical of America on foreign soil than any other president in American history. My confidence in the future flows from the fact that people are waking up to all this.”
He savaged the “neo-Monarchists” who are “the guys who ran the Freddie Mac, and the Fannie Mae, the post office and Armtrak,” and who think “they really can run our economy effectively.”
But much of that stuff flows predictably from his book: America is the greatest country on the planet and Obama’s policies have been similarly destructive of our economic vitality as his foreign policy is to our country’s military strength. Obama’s wrong – and Romney would have us believe that he needs to be replaced. Romney never outright says who that replacement will be, but as Romney towers over the room – he is freakishly tall in real life – you know who he has in mind. Decline is a choice and we can choose something else. Indeed the fate of the world demands nothing less.
My favorite bit from the speech was his argument for why young Americans ought to be conservative – or rather why no thinking young person should be a liberal: entitlements, which his generation has voted time and time to increase with nary a thought as to how to fund them.
“In fact, we’re expecting you guys to be taxed enough to pay me and my cohort for all these entitlements down the road. That’s why I made the point that I don’t know how any thinking person who is a young person can be a liberal.”
