Socialized Medicine

Governor Mitt Romney: Eyes Penalties for Those Lacking Insurance

Flap was listening to Hugh Hewitt’s radio show on KRLA yesterday and up poped the Governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney as a guest. Romney presented and discussed his new and astoundingly government controlling proposal for statewide healthcare Romney eyes penalties for those lacking insurance:

Massachusetts residents who choose not to obtain health insurance would face tax penalties and even the garnishing of their wages under a proposal Governor Mitt Romney unveiled yesterday.

Romney says the ”individual mandate” he is proposing, part of his broader plan to cover the roughly 500,000 people who are uninsured, would not cost the state any money. But some healthcare specialists say the approach might cost hundreds of millions of dollars more than state taxpayers currently provide for government health coverage.

Romney’s plan would require all residents in Massachusetts to have some form of health insurance or agree to pay their medical bills out of their own pockets. No other state has such a requirement, and if Romney manages to make it law, it would be a compelling accomplishment he could point to if he runs for president.

In an era where citizens demand less governmental instrusion in their lives here comes a child-support – alimony type government coercion plan to make sure you pay your medical bills.

This proposal reeks of 19th century Mormon self-reliance but is out of the mainstream of MODERN political thought and should be rejected as quickly as any notion that Romney has any chance for the Presidency in 2008.

”No more ‘free riding,’ if you will, where an individual says: ‘I’m not going to pay, even though I can afford it. I’m not going to get insurance, even though I can afford it. I’m instead going to just show up and make the taxpayers pay for me,’ ” Romney told reporters after a healthcare speech at the John F. Kennedy Library.

‘It’s the ultimate conservative idea, which is that people have responsibility for their own care, and they don’t look to government to take of them if they can afford to take care of themselves,” Romney told reporters after his speech.

This is not a conservative healthcare plan at all. It is government intrusion.

If you want a conservative healthcare plan, then go to a private, free market system with government vouchers for the truely indigent, poor and disabled.

“All around us, we see signs that government mandates and heavy-handed, command-and-control models of providing healthcare don’t work and people are abandoning those, and yet the governor seems to be running toward them,” said Michael Cannon of the libertarian Cato Institute.

Gary Claxton — vice president of the Kaiser Family Foundation, which studies health policy — said individual mandates have been rejected before because Americans ”don’t like to tell individuals what to do.”

Karen Davis, president of the Commonwealth Fund, a private foundation that supports research on health and social issues, said: ”The sticking point has always been the affordability of coverage. It’s one thing to tell people they have to buy it. If they can’t afford it, what do you do? Fine them? Put them in jail?”

Exactly!